This book is about the reality of coping with Bi-polar Disorder when it has devastated your world. It's about living with Bi-polar on benefits as opposed to, say, Bi-polar on Bollinger, which is all we've seen on TV and in the press, it seems. How many sufferers are there who have lost everything to this burden and face a bleak future? How many sufferers are alone with it, undiagnosed, wrongly diagnosed, untreated, unsupported?

Sadly there's a deep-held view that those, particularly single mums, claiming mental ill-health and state benefits are lazy, ignorant parasites who should get a...