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ROSS SZABO: My childhood was great. I loved being the youngest of my family. You know, I got along with my brothers really well. We did camping trips, and had birthday parties, and scavenger hunts.
It was the summer before my junior year of high school. I would sleep for an hour a night. And my mind was just constantly racing. It was like a TV screen, the channels are just flipping, and flipping, and flipping, and flipping.
I'd just reached these euphoric highs, where I felt like I was on top of the world, where nothing could stop me, nothing could bring me down. And then I would have this depression, the lowest of the low. So it was just this kind of monstrosity of ever-changing emotions.
I got to the psychiatrist at 16, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But the diagnosis is never the end point. It's always the beginning.
I was taking the medication and going to therapy. But I wasn't changing anything else outside my life. I started drinking really young because drinking was a quick, effective thing to shut my mind down.
The symptoms did start to get worse. And it started with explosive anger-- breaking my knuckles, punching walls, or breaking my nose. I was thinking about suicide and death 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But I think the worst times were even further after that. I was abusing alcohol in a way that was dangerous to my life. It came to a head where one night I passed out for 22 hours.
I said, all right, you're either going to continue doing this and you're going to die, or you're going to have to change something. But what I really had to change was that I hated myself. I made sure that I stopped drinking alcohol. I stopped smoking cigarettes, stopped smoking weed.
I replaced the alcohol with talking to my friends and expressing myself, but also by exercising, reading, and doing things I enjoyed.
I became the Director of Outreach at the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign. And I ran the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign for eight years. I joined the Peace Corps in 2010. And then I started a company that develops mental health curriculum for kids.
If I could talk to myself before the diagnosis, and before the onslaught of emotions, I think I would want that guy to know that it was OK to go through it, that it took strength to talk about those emotions and not hide them. Because I think the hiding of it is what almost killed me.
I'm very lucky. I'm very lucky to be alive.
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