New Book Released: Diary of a Mental Patient - A Journey Toward Acceptance

March 24, 2014 - PRLog -- I was 26 years old when I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. For the next seventeen years, I refused to accept the truth. I continued to drink excessive amounts of alcohol and use drugs of both the legal and illegal variety. I suffered from suicidal ideation and made several determined attempts to take my own life. As a result, I was often committed-usually involuntarily to psychiatric hospitals. In March of 2007, a small hospital in Brunswick, Maine, offered me hope that I could live – actually live – with bipolar disorder IF I would accept the fact that I have it versus denying it. Diary of a Mental Patient: A Journey Toward Acceptance is just what its title implies. Presented in diary format, it chronicles one full year of my personal life as I struggle toward accepting the fact that I have a lifelong mental illness. It is one thing to say: "Yes, I have a mental disorder, but I have accepted it, and I can live with it." I quickly learned, however, that it is quite another to actually do it. Diary of a Mental Patient: A Journey Toward Acceptance offers an up-close and personal look inside the mind of a person with mental illness, the day-to-day struggle and search for reasons to live a life that is affected, usually negatively, by an incurable (but treatable) mental illness.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Christina Solak-Goodwin has been a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor for fourteen years, five of those in her private practice. She also has been a professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at the University of Southern Maine. Christina also works as a Registered Nurse at Mid Coast Senior Health Center in Brunswick, Maine. Her first book, Battling Bipolar Disorder, A Memoir, was published in March 2011. At the request of Lewiston Auburn Magazine, she also wrote "Bipolar Basics" for their March 2012 issue. In addition to her professions, Christina is a homemaker, wife, mother of three school-age children, and spends her "spare time" speaking about bipolar disorder wherever she can find an audience: libraries, hospitals, classrooms, even private homes.

Diary of a Mental Patient: A Journey Toward Acceptance is available on Amazon, BN.com, and bookstores everywhere. ISBN: 9781929882915, $15.95.