Bipolar Times

While the title of this blog may be Random Thoughts, I plan to write mostly about a specific topic, namely mental illness, a very sensitive subject. My life was relatively normal until one day at Duke University in North Carolina I heard a voice in my mind say to me, "This is God, and I have a mission for you." Since then, my life has fallen apart, and I have gone from Roman Catholic to atheist. There cannot be a god after all I've gone through. No loving and good god would let people suffer from mental illness.

The psychiatrists eventually diagnosed that I suffer from bipolar disorder, a severe mental illness. The voice started speaking to me in the summer of 1993 while I was working as a research assistant at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory at Duke. In the fall of 1993, I was bound for Harvard University to study for a Ph.D. in physics under a fellowship from the U.S. Department of Defense. Since then, I never earned the Ph.D. and now I am permanently disabled due to the condition I have.

I do not work at all, or the U.S. government will take away my Social Security disability income and my health insurance, which I desperately need for my expensive treatment for bipolar disorder. I cannot afford my own home, and the only way my life works is I have to live with my aging and ailing parents. Sometimes, it's me who takes care of them and as they grow older, I will have to take more responsibility for them.

My life is a life of despair and hopelessness. My dream had been to work as a scientist, a physicist to be exact. Bipolar disorder shattered my dream. I eventually dropped out of Harvard and tried again at Duke University to earn a Ph.D. in physics. Failing health, mental and physical, forced me to drop out of Duke and to declare bankruptcy. I briefly worked for the Navy at an R & D laboratory in San Diego, California. I finally attended the University of California of San Diego (UCSD) to try to complete my Ph.D.

To earn a Ph.D. in physics at most universities, a graduate student must pass a written qualifying examination in his or her first or second year in the program. The qualifying exam tests all undergraduate level physics plus the first year of graduate school. If you fail it, the university expels you.

The exam, which I took on September 11, was so difficult I was convinced that I failed it. After the test, I immediately moved to my parents' home in Las Vegas, Nevada. I attempted to commit suicide, but survived of course. Since then I have been unable to recover and live a normal life. But life has been abnormal since 1993.