The Bahamas is a 700-island nation off the coast of Florida, home to 400,000 inhabitants. I grew up there and lived a charmed life: we had a mansion on an acre of land with 270-degree ocean views, a maid, a gardener and a boat. I went to the best school on the island of Nassau, was skippering sunfish boats from the age of 7 and had a happy circle of friends. But I also had early signs of a mood disorder. When the offshore banking crisis of the late 1980s pushed us out of our idyllic paradise, my family and I relocated to Florida, a move that exacerbated my mood disorder at the start of high school. The Florida Keys are nothing like the Bahamas, despite the apparent similarities of sun and shore. With my parents devastated by their social fall, I was set adrift alone in a new land. I became highly inhibited and increasingly isolated myself. What seemed like typical angst soon progressed into a paranoia that people were out to humiliate me.

More adrift than ever by the time I got to college, an island unto myself, I was single-mindedly focused on achieving perfection, to the point of exercising the most, eating the least and being the best student. Not even a stay in the psychiatric ward freshman year caused me to slow down; in fact, it caused me to flee from the truth. You can’t ask for help when you don’t see that you have a problem. Fire mixed with gas when I became infatuated with a dashing young linguistics professor who invited me to his house and left me unable to distinguish truth from fantasy. With my distortion of reality complete, I was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia. Medications led to a quick physical recovery, but my emotional recovery took many years and many false starts. The life-changing therapy of a blind psychologist challenged me to question a belief system that had made me sick, yet also gave me the tools to manage a condition that was never going to go away.

ADRIFT is the story of losing my mind as I became a young adult. But once I got back on my feet, my turnaround unfolded like a novel, the inspiration for writing this true account. I found true love at age 28, never before having dated. I became an international scholar. I have become an advocate for compassion for those with mental illness and am highly aware of people who suffer. No one would guess that I am only pills away from complete incapacitation, where I once was. I wrote this book in the hopes of showing that a diagnosis of mental illness does not have to be devastating. You can recover and lead any kind of life you want.