New memoir explores the sanity in mental illness

From The Asbury Park Press in N.J.:

"There are no people anywhere who don't have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. The myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time." ~Mark Vonnegut

What is it like to not trust your own brain? Where quiet voices scream crazy ideas that can cause a Harvard-educated pediatrician to propel himself through a third story window?

What's it like to know you must perform this act to prove your worthiness to God, or one of your sons will die?

He touches on the first time he started hearing voices in his early 20s and continues to his eventual remission, his journey through medical school and fatherhood, and the descent once more into mental illness.
During his last breakdown in his late 30s, he explains, "Thoughts come into the mind as firmly as established truths — the fantastic presents itself as fact." Thoughts that can cause an esteemed doctor, colleague, husband and father to be carried off to the hospital.

Vonnegut first wrote about his battle with mental illness 30 years ago in "The Eden Express," a story that chronicles his time living in a commune, then undergoing hospitalization for the first time in his early 20s when he was no longer able to eat or sleep. In this follow-up memoir, he writes about the sudden reappearance of his schizophrenia, which since has been diagnosed as bipolar disorder or, as it often is called, manic depression.

His journey is a jumbled obstacle course, the twists, turns, pauses and flashbacks making for a sometimes awkward read. He touches on his youth and what it was like growing up the son of a yet-to-be famous writer. He deals with his brilliant mother, who received messages from license plates and traffic lights. He replays living in a house with two siblings and four cousins whom he refers to as "the orphans."

Nothing about his life was conventional, and being average, fitting in, was frowned upon.

He returns his medical practice after his first marriage ends in divorce. Six years later, he remarries, has a third son and, by all accounts, lives a normal life with a only a few "internal conversations."

The voices never leave completely. And perhaps it's like his mother once told him: "Why don't you just go along with them?"

It's an interesting book by a brilliant man who defied all odds by going from mental patient to physician — and back and forth again. He takes the reader by the hand and explains mental illness through the lens of logic.