My Fluorescent God
Joe Guppy, 2014
Booktrope Editions
202 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620154410
Summary
In 1979, the 23-year-old Guppy was dealing with a bad breakup and existential angst, but it was a few stomach pills he took in Mexico that pushed him over the edge into paranoid psychosis… and straight into the mental ward of Seattle’s Providence Hospital.
Once Guppy recovered, he put his journals and medical records in a cardboard box, marked the box “Crazy Period,” and didn’t open it until 30 years later when he decided to write My Fluorescent God.
In this raw, often wryly comic memoir, Guppy battles his personal demons, jumps out a second-story window, and encounters God in a fluorescent light fixture. He was barraged with psychotropic drugs and rigid cognitive-behavioral therapy, and threatened with shock treatment, but what helped him was the traditional "talking cure."
The story of Guppy’s struggle to rebuild his sanity is not only a gripping spiritual and psychological adventure, but one he hopes will speak to those whose lives have been touched by mental illness. (From the publisher.)