My father's very public life as Famous Amos was the opposite of that of his ex-wife, my mother Shirley, who was fighting a very private, solitary battle with mental illness.

There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.

A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.

It is possible and very common to overcome and manage a mental illness.

Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.