Mental illness is serious business — “bipolar disorder is a legitimate and lethal illness that has nearly killed me on several occasions,” author Melody Moezzi writes. Yet the dominant tone in Moezzi’s memoir of battling the disease, including manic episodes that took her over that “fine line between eccentric exuberance and madness,” is an infectious, freewheeling humor. The whipsmart but whimsical daughter of Iranian immigrant doctors, Moezzi details a series of maladies that befell her even before mania set in: First among them was the cultural dislocation of “enduring the seventh grade as the staggeringly skinny, flat-chested brown girl in Ohio, with a budding unibrow and a faint mustache.”

Intelligent, accurate, entertaining, culturally relevant, and a little sassy are words not usually put together in one sentence to describe a book about mental health. They do, however, nail Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life by Melody Moezzi.

Melody Moezzi is many things. She is an activist, lawyer, author, speaker, and an Iranian American. Unfortunately, it is her bipolar disorder that has largely defined her life. 

A fine line separates creativity and madness. Bipolar disorder teeters along that line, with patients experiencing moments of impulsive thought, which can yield bold insights or quickly descend into confusion or rage.

"There are plenty of respectable reasons to kill yourself, but I've never had any." So opens Raleigh author Melody Moezzi's memoir, Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life. Raised in a vibrant Islamic-American community in Dayton, Ohio, Moezzi felt loved and supported, never more so than when a physical illness landed her in the hospital at 18 and her hospital room filled with flowers and get-well wishes. But when her bipolar disorder surfaced, leading to a suicide attempt, sanitarium visits and a stunning array of mood stabilizers and antipsychotics, Moezzi's community turned colder. By turns truth-telling and humorous, Haldol and Hyacinths recounts the ways that psychological illness is judged or disbelieved along cultural and social lines. Ultimately Moezzi finds healing and inspiration in perseverance, embracing aspects of her condition while pushing through others: "Here is the problem with madness. How do you sort out the ocelots from the creative breakthroughs, or the elephants from the nail-biting cessation? You don't."

Melody Moezzi once tried to commit suicide in a psychiatrist's office, and had hallucinations in which Joseph Stalin and her fourth-grade teacher were participants. How she struggled to understand her bipolar illness and became an advocate and spokesperson for mental illness is the subject of Moezzi's compelling memoir, "Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life." 

In her defiantly frank memoir, Iranian-American Melody Moezzi reveals that the worst part of being bipolar wasn’t the meds or hospital stays but the stigma. Iranians, she says, “prefer to sweep [mental health issues] under our prettiest Persian rugs.”

One of Melody Moezzi's biggest gripes about being bipolar is that nobody rewards it. "If you have cancer, you get flowers, visitors and compassion. If you have a mental illness, you get plastic utensils, isolation and fear. If you survive cancer, people consider you a hero and inspiration, and they tell you so."

“Perhaps insanity is inescapable when you separate a soul from its vessel,” muses Iranian-American activist, author, and lawyer Moezzi (War on Error) in her strangely affecting chronicle of living with bipolar disorder. She attributes her affliction to a variety of factors—cultural vertigo, post-9/11 prejudice against Muslims, a rare pancreatic disorder, overwhelming family pressure—and over the years has attempted suicide and suffered from a full-blown manic episode, as well as psychotic breaks. To recreate the gaps in her memory during these traumatic periods, she relies on recollections of friends and family, and her husband’s detailed notes. Some readers may not embrace Moezzi’s bad-girl persona—she stages rebellions in hospital wards and offers strong opinions on a range of subjects—but her vivid descriptions of being pulled against her will in a swirl of impulsivity, hallucinations, and paranoia are riveting. She also uses offbeat humor to criticize the medical profession’s handling of the mentally ill. Her often black-and-white thinking is mercifully softened by abundant gratitude for the saintly patience of her husband, the practicality of her mother, and the wisdom of her Rumi-quoting father. A poetic portrait of life on the lines of sanity and a mind on the edge of cultures.

An Iranian-American political activist and writer’s memoir of how she came to terms with her bicultural heritage and bipolar disorder.