Bipolar disorder is the third most common mood disorder after major depression and dysthymic disorder (morbid depression and anxiety with accompanying obsession). It affects about 1 percent of adults during their lifetime. Studies have indicated that bipolar depression is genetically inherited, occurring more commonly within families.

Symptoms typically begin during adolescence or early adulthood, and continue to recur throughout life, with both men and women equally likely to suffer. Without effective intervention, bipolar illness leads to suicide in nearly 20 percent of cases.

There are treatment options. But because bipolar disorder is often not recognized by the patient, relatives, friends, or even some physicians, people with bipolar disorder may suffer needlessly for years... perhaps for their entire lives. Depression is not fully recognized by most health care insurance providers; most will pay only 50 percent of treatment costs for outpatient care, as well as limiting the number of visits.

I have come to believe that, at least to some extent, I have been experiencing this bipolar train ride for all of my life; I lived in a perceived world of surreal highs and devastating lows. Very early on, this created for me a feeling of separation from others and from the world, a phenomenon I would later try to numb with drugs and alcohol.

This is, in fact, very common; an estimated 60 percent of all people with bipolar disorder have drug or alcohol dependence. It is my belief that fellowship-oriented substance abuse recovery groups are inhabited by an inordinate number of those who suffer not only from their very real addictions, but also varying levels of bipolar disease.

Sadly, shame also plays a factor with many of us who don't want others to know about our secret suffering. Where does this irrational shame come from? My recently published book, Prodigal Song: A Memoir, tells the story of my own battle with addiction and depression. Early in the book, I write about the confusion and fear surrounding the progression of my mother's own deterioration, lost in her private prison of fear and drugs.

I won't try to explain what happened to our mother. I more often than not see only dusty, empty rooms when I go in search for her back there, to that place of my past where my mind sometimes wanders but rarely lingers. I believe in words like psychosis and bipolar disease and schizophrenia, and I believe in chemical imbalances and "bad wiring" of the brain. I can spout lots of technical jargon and use psychoanalytical language to describe some things science can understand and some things it does not. I'm supposed to have some understanding of neurotransmitters and receptor molecules, but all that cannot completely explain how people sometimes become lost to themselves and lost to the rest of us.

And I believe in unseen darkness and demons, too, and I'm not at all sure where one set of beliefs leaves off and the other takes up. All I know for sure is that God exists, that there is a world beyond what we can see and touch and feel, and that within that world evil exists, too. And I believe that for some of us in obvious ways and probably all of us in more subtle ways the disease thrives and makes its home in more than just our flesh, and medicine alone rarely cures us.

And maybe the details don't matter as much as we think. Because for whatever reason and perhaps for no reason at all, our mother became ill. Her life changed, and ours with it. I'm not sure when it started or how quickly it worsened. It was, in a way, like the slow closing of a morning glory at dusk. She began to lose her light, and we all watched her fold into a darkness that would eventually cause her to wither and never open again...