High Times & Rough Rides of a Bipolar Addict review and discount

High Times & Rough Rides of a Bipolar Addict description

If anyone who reads my life story can somehow prevent even a single child or teenager from repeating my mistakes and avoid unnecessary future suffering, then my struggles will not have been in vain. Imagine being arrested, handcuffed and locked behind the bars of a large, dark, cold jail. The next day you are forcibly dragged to a high-rise building and thrust into a 4'x 8’ solid steel-walled cell. Your freedom is ripped away, even though you have not been charged with a single crime. The prison guard tells you, "They are going to lock you up and throw away the key!" You are driven to an insane asylum where a psychiatrist prescribes shock treatments. The first electric voltages pass through your brain, and your heart stops. You are revived, then given a series of nine more ECT treatments without anesthesia. Each one feels like a sledge hammer to your head. You remain confined indoors and drugged for months. Then one day you are told you can go home and to "Have a nice life!" This is my story. --Kerry Barger An editorial review by Priscilla Estes of The US Review of Books: "Below are my five recommendations to avoid going insane (like I did) and to avoid insuring that you become some kind of worthless, pathetic, immoral, blubbering idiot in the future." The cover shows an adorable pre-school cowboy clutching matching six-shooters and grinning at the camera. The Roy Rogers image belies the misery on the pages that follow. What started as a private, therapeutic journal steamrolled into an honest account of a life derailed by grief, drugs, and addictive relationships. Barger does not apologize, make excuses or ask forgiveness for the way he lived his life. He merely tells it... he chose to take drugs, have affairs and break the law... Barger's unapologetic denigration of self renders him vulnerable and strangely likeable. After all, he didn't choose his broken, alcoholic family; he didn't choose institutionalization and ten electro-convulsive therapy (shock) treatments at age seventeen; he didn't choose genetic mental illness and a deep, gnawing emptiness inside. But he did choose to devote his life to working with the handicapped in state mental facilities in Texas and to write this book. Barger's factual style, callous accounts of womanizing and angry outbursts are sometimes uncomfortable to read... The book is a brave chronicle of how not to live and admonishes readers to follow their bliss, go for their dreams, and never give up. http://www.theusreview.com/reviews/High-Barger.html (Notice to literary agents, publishers and producers: all applicable rights are open for bid. Contact information is available at the end of the book.)
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