A Touch of Bipolar: The madness of a suicide

A hard-hitting bipolar disorder memoir nevertheless full of dark humour, ‘A Touch of Bipolar’ tells a story of love and loss, and one man’s struggle to regain mental clarity, overcoming depression in an attempt to win back his life. Growing up in apartheid South Africa and then in the world of an English boarding school, Joss Smith Wesson was at one time a normal, adventurous teenager, a paragon of health and fitness as he explored the world. When a lurking darkness on the edge of his mind comes to the fore, however, a disastrous collapse in mental health leads him to be sectioned and placed in a psychiatric hospital. With his personal life and financial security on the line, his mental clarity falters beneath the overwhelming desire to self-destruct. Only musings on the world around him, and the recounting of his life in a bipolar disorder memoir, keep him anchored to his sanity. ‘A Touch of Bipolar’ follows Joss Smith Wesson in his battle with the darkness on the edge of mental health and fitness, and speaks to both those suffering from Bipolar Disorder and a wider audience about the pressures of overcoming depression in an unsympathetic world.