Through The Withering Storm: A Brief History of a Mental Illness Now Available in Paperback in Time for Bipolar Awareness Month

Edmonton, Canada, February 26, 2013 --(PR.com)-- "Through The Withering Storm: A Brief History of a Mental Illness" is a book that tries to help others to find renewed hope for sufferers of Bipolar Disorder and their loved ones, as it deals in an honest and open way what it is like to suffer from a disease of the mind. This book, now available in paperback for the first time on amazon brings us through a cataclysm of misadventures. The book, with a foreword by prominent Psychiatrist Dr. Brian Bishop, has helped liberate sufferers from their desperation on a small scale as they discover how adaptable and resilient the human mind and body are. Now, with the power of the Internet, it is hoped that this work will reach many more who had thought that Bipolar was a death sentence, as did the author when first coping with the disease.

In the book, we follow the author's narrative as he begins his first summer course for Air Cadets while friends back home watch soap operas, work on their tans and enjoy their freedom. This was not the path the author chose. Graduating from Basic Training first in his class does nothing to erase a black mark he receives for fighting. The author goes on to complete more summer courses and add rank and decorations to his uniform, but before he can earn his wings he is forcibly confined to a Psychiatric ward for an illness he can't understand and doesn't accept. From then on we follow our main character as he struggles with the alcoholism of his father and soon he becomes a teenage alcoholic himself as he self-medicates his demons away.

As the years pass filled with loneliness, depression and despair, we see into the mind of the author as he goes forward to the inevitable: a life filled with multiple admissions to a mental hospital. Even this doesn't erase his desire to fly, and for a time we follow the narrative of the writer's days as a student pilot, right up until he has yet another breakdown.

Time passes, and dreams change. After returning to Edmonton the hope and dream of one day becoming a writer and telling his story becomes stronger-and just 3 weeks after the fateful 9/11 incidents, our hero leaves the hospital and spends 11 years free of the dark spectre of uncontrolled mental illness and in that time composes "Through The Withering Storm."

Richard Van Camp, author of "The Lesser Blessed" calls this book "courageous and humbling."

A troubled teen, searching for her own answers to what seems an unfair world said "I just couldn't stop reading it."

This book was written for many people. For the nurses who can't seem to understand what their patients go through, for the sick who deny their illness and refuse treatment, and for the families and loved ones of the mentally ill who must forgive so much so many times they one day feel they have to give up. The author states, on the back cover in words that ring all too true, "This is a book that will change the way you look at everyone."