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person’s madness is another’s perceived gift.
    Many wish to believe that the odd is not so odd, the bizarre not so bizarre, and there is little changing of minds once they are set. There are only so many ways to understand the strange and disordered. The Greeks imagined gods to explain what they themselves could not. It is human nature to invent reasons for why the mind shatters, hope plummets, or the will to live dies. Scientific explanations are complicated and, for many, less humanly satisfying than visionary or religious ones. They are also less interesting than explanations based on planetary misalignment, toxins, or childhoods gone awry. There is a disturbing gap between what scientists and doctors know about mental illness and what most people believe.
    Some expressed resentment that I had had the advantage of financial security and supportive friends, colleagues, and family: What right did I have to complain? I could not possibly understand the real pain of mental illness. One colleague, hard-edged and drunk, in front of several of our junior colleagues, snapped that she thought because I had had a “privileged” upbringing, I had “no right” to write about the pain of bipolar illness; it was presumptuous. I found this outrageous. It seemed beyond the pale to have to explain to a professor of psychiatry that the pain of bipolar illness, like the pain of cancer, does not discriminate on the basis of “privilege.”
    At the end of the day, only Richard could make me feel less awful about the vitriol that came my way. Put the letters aside, he would say. Ignore the ugliness. If you must reread them, put them away for a week or so. He believed, from his own experience of having received stinging critiques on scientific papers, that criticism never seemed as bad on subsequent reading. Often he would call friends of ours and suggest that a group of us go out to dinner, knowing that warmth and laughter and shared tales of scathing reviews or wicked comments would lessen the hurt.
    After a particularly difficult time, Richard planned a long weekend for us on the Eastern Shore, thinking that the Chesapeake Bay, which I had loved since childhood, might pull me out of my discouragement and gloom. He insisted that we do nothing but eat, sleep, walk, and make love. No talk of work or illness, no obsessing over the rightness or wrongness of decisions made. No dwelling on hostile letters.
    I fell in love with Richard all over again that weekend and, as he knew I would, fell back in love with life. One afternoon, he went out for a drive and came back with a large cottonwood swan under each arm. Decoys, a male and a female, they had been carved by craftsmen on the Eastern Shore; they were beautiful. And, as Richard pointed out, swans mate for life.
    Despite the occasional criticism and second-guessing, most people were kind in ways I could not have imagined. Acts of cruelty or criticism have been far outweighed by innumerable acts of warmth and generosity. For every discomfort about the loss of privacy or fear of personal or professional reprisal, there has been a countervailing relief in the honesty.
    More than anything, I have been impressed by what people survive: the pain, the injustices of a health-care system that makes no pretense of fairness toward those with mental illness, financial ruin, violence, and most devastating, the suicide of a child, husband or wife, or parent. Everywhere I have gone, I have seen the wreckage left by mental illness and the resilience, inventiveness, and generosity of those who contend with it.
    This mixture of devastation and bounty is most obvious in students who struggle with mental illness. I had been particularly eager to reach out to young people with my book, in part because the student years represent the age of greatest risk—the average age of onset of bipolar illness is eighteen or so—and in part because I, at that age, felt so alone with the uncertainty and terror of my own