This is a tough one, to read or discuss. Author Juliet Escoria wrote an auto-fiction to detail experiences with likely align quite a bit with her own youth leading up to and following a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Brief, raw chapters capture the pain and confusion surrounding these turbulent months and years where she partied hard with her friends, alienated her parents, regularly hallucinated, and attempted suicide over and over. Medication messed with her head and in the documentation provided by the doctor in the special school for difficult kids far from home in the middle of nowhere, the reasons are laid out bare. To tamp out the mania and hallucinations Juliet has to suffer the side effects of hair loss, weight gain, lethargy, insomnia, etc. and, plucked from everything familiar, her drug connections and her friends, these bodily changes are hard to take. She's finally lacking control and does her best to manipulate the staff into getting anything, Ativan to sleep, or secret time with her boyfriend(s), any return to her normal. Her parents sent her there in an attempt to save Juliet from herself and though she enters the school with their relationship in tatters, she sees other kids like her, on the brink, and realizes how scary it must have been for her mom and dad to see her so close to death, on a road that leads only leads to certain destruction.