For me, my diagnosis came out of nowhere. It was 10 years ago and I had been working in a very high stress, intense job that I was actually doing really well at. I had a manic episode that followed a week long period of not being able to sleep very well. And so I maybe slept three hours a night that entire week and my husband was on a business trip, so he gets back on Friday and realizes that something wasn’t right. My symptoms got progressively worse: racing thoughts, pressured speech—so I really had something to say, but I couldn’t get it out fast enough—and again, the trouble sleeping. And so he realized something was wrong and called the advice nurse line from our health insurance and she said, "It sounds like it could be a psychiatric emergency so you need to get her to the hospital."

I mean at that point I remember being in the triage room. And then from there was held until they could find a bed in a psychiatric ward.