Bring Me to Light: Embracing My Bipolar and Social Anxiety by Eleanor Segall. No Advance Reader Copy included. No affiliate links used. Read my full disclosure policy here.
Bipolar disorder runs in Eleanor Segall's family, so while her diagnosis wasn't wholly unsurprising — especially when her periods of depression gave way to episodes of mania and psychosis — that doesn't mean it was an easy diagnosis to accept or adjust to.
Taking us back to when she first became ill at 15, Segall shares her experiences of depression, mania, psychosis, social anxiety, and agoraphobia. She writes candidly about the time she spent in hospital, both involuntarily and voluntarily. We learn about the impact bipolar disorder and social anxiety has had on her education and work life. How her life didn't follow the plan she thought it would.
There is also a really interesting and important discussion about religion and mental health. Segall is Jewish and writes wonderfully about this part of her identity and her volunteer work with Jami, a mental health service for the Jewish community.
Calling people courageous for writing about their mental health can seem trite these days, but it is brave of Segall to share her experiences of hypersexuality during manic episodes and what consent actually means in these circumstances.
This is an aspect of an already complex mental illness that is not talked about enough. I can understand why. It's often not an experience people want to revisit after the fact. Or it's a period of time that they have little to no memory of. Or they've fallen into a shame spiral and talking to people about it is the last thing they want to do.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently because it's one of the symptoms of bipolar disorder that people are familiar with, but that does not mean we understand it fully. Or know how to react when people we know are in this situation.
At its core Bring Me to Light by Eleanor Segall is about learning to live alongside your mental illness. Recovery is possible, but it takes work. Recovery also isn't linear and periods of relapse can and do happen. All of which is OK. It can be complicated and messy, but relapse does not mean you have failed.
If you live with bipolar disorder, much of Bring Me to Light will resonate even if your experience doesn't exactly match Segall's. I would also recommend it to people who don't have a mental health condition, but who want to learn more about mental illness.
Bring Me to Light: Embracing My Bipolar and Social Anxiety by Eleanor Segall is published by Trigger Publishing and is available in paperback and ebook format.