Escape from Myself: A Manic-Depressive's Journey To Nowhere

This is the memoir of a man who had everything: family, good job, house. He walked away from it. Why? Tom Roberts learned five years after he just walked away and lost everything he had bipolar disorder II and the reason he left all that he had was because he was in a manic episode. Tom’s memoir takes the reader from what appeared to be a comfortable college professor’s life to the dirty streets of Hollywood, CA. He was living in a fantasy that he could earn a living as a film actor just as he dreamed when he was in high school. His “escape” as he calls it, was triggered by medical treatment following a horrible depression that had lasted six months by the time he was hospitalized. He was prescribed the new antidepressant Prozac and it turned out to be the worst anti-depressant for a yet undiagnosed manic-depressive. Tom’s story begins, however, 30 years earlier in a family dominated by his Father’s undiagnosed mental illness and then the sudden death of his 34-year-old Mother. Tom lived through the suicides of his brother and later his step-sister. The end surprisingly, is back in Hollywood as a working voice-over actor with several on-camera film credits. How he got there is the rest of the story and the final destination of his journey that went from nowhere to “now here”.