Delano was in her early teens when the ground went out from under her — a model student, a national-ranked squash player, class president, and at home a girl locking herself in her bedroom, raging at her family, thinking about her own death. Her parents took her to a psychiatrist. Within that first appointment came the diagnosis, bipolar disorder, and the prescription: a mood stabiliser and an antidepressant. It was the start of fourteen years inside the psychiatric system — more diagnoses, more drugs, nineteen of them in total by the end — each one a fresh attempt to reach a daughter her family could see was in real trouble but could not get back.

The drugs didn't fix what was happening to her, and for years things only got worse: drinking, cutting, outbursts that frightened the people closest to her. Her family loved her and had no way to reach her — through three hospital admissions, one of them after a suicide attempt that came close to ending her life for good. They went to a doctor, because that is what responsible people do. That hospitalisation is why there is a next chapter to this story at all.

None of my clients have lived this exact story. But the shape of it is familiar to almost everyone who ends up in my practice: despair that doesn't show on the outside, carried for years behind a record of achievement that looks like nothing is wrong, while the people who love them watch from close up, frightened, unable to find the door in. An executive carries something else: a board seat, a result that cannot slip, a family who has started to notice that something is wrong. The setting differs. The inside feels the same.

Worth knowing, briefly: Delano and her husband Cooper also run the Inner Compass Initiative, peer support for people tapering off psychiatric medication. It is a late, passing mention in her own book, and this notes it the same way. ICI functions as a resource for my own clients — a place to find peer support alongside coaching, for those comfortable with less confidentiality than one-to-one coaching gives.

Read this one to feel what it costs to lose yourself inside a system built to help, and what it takes to come back from it. Read the Maudsley Guidelines or Crossing Zero, reviewed separately, for how a taper actually works. This book is doing something else entirely: being honest about what the despair, and the people frightened on the other side of it, actually feel like — and it succeeds.