Inside the Insane

Description Inside the Insane is a first hand account of life inside a psychiatric crisis ward in Los Angeles, California. From patients suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia to bipolar disorder disease, to major depressive disorder, Inside the Insane takes the reader inside the walls of the mentally insane and manifests the realities of the human condition. Erica provides detailed accounts of patients screaming in restraints, to being locked in seclusion, to suffering from over medication, in radical raw detail. She also takes a look at the mental health system in Los Angeles County and exposes the concealed world of how society treats the mentally ill. From locked institutions, to board and cares, to living on the streets in Skid Row, the horrific conditions surrounding the life of a person suffering from a mental illness is explicitly exposed. Told through the eyes of a person dealing with her own mental illness, Inside the Insane also takes the reader on a personal journey of Erica's manic self-destruction, deep depression, and the process of treatment, medication and recovery. Her authentic journal entries beginning in 1999 expose her mental illness before knowledge of its existence. Her accounts of flying through the streets of New York, to sitting solemn on a fire escape in lonely depression, call attention to her life before treatment. As a result, an in-depth analysis of her own writings, coupled with the writings of previous renowned writers who also suffered from manic depression, underscores the potential to discover a person suffering from a mental illness prior to a first mental break. Such a discovery offers the chance to anticipate a mental illness and can help an individual seek treatment before it results in a suicide attempt, or a hospitalization. In 2005, Erica was diagnosed with chronic hypomania, Bipolar II, which was a turning point in her life as she began the process of psychiatric treatment. True journal accounts of her ongoing attempt to find the right medication to balance her highs and lows reveal the struggles she endures and how she works to handle that condition on an ongoing basis. She also discloses how her condition affects family and friends, and how those relationships are defined and redefined before and after the discovery of her disease. This groundbreaking expose opens the door to a world that has traditionally been locked up and ignored, and exposes it with shocking detail as the hidden truths inside the minds of the insane are intensely uncovered.