The Years of Silence Are Past: My Father's Life with Bipolar Disorder

Academic psychologist Hinshaw has skillfully woven both autobiography and biography into this moving and instructive account of his father's mental illness. The book opens with several endearing photographs of his father, from youth to parenthood. But the photos don't reveal the pain: while in the 12th grade in 1936, Hinshaw's father, Virgil (or Junior, as he's called), had jumped off his family's roof in a crazed attempt to save the world. After almost a year of starving himself in a county institution, Junior rebounded to attend Stanford, the University of Iowa and Princeton. Readers then see him living two lives, one full of achievements--meeting with Albert Einstein, working as a philosophy professor at Ohio State, forming a lasting marriage and fathering two children--and the other full of unexpected moments of profound depression and sometimes delusion, which lead him, misdiagnosed, to institutionalization. Sheltered from this family secret until his college days, Hinshaw explains how the silence from his father's absences hung in the air like a toxin. After his father finally shared his suffering with his son, they began years of healing talks about the disorder. Throughout this tender narrative, readers learn about the symptoms that distinguish bipolar disorder from schizophrenia, as well as its possible causes and treatments. Hinshaw's work offers an in-depth look at this illness while celebrating the resilience of a man facing a world of extremes.