If five years ago someone had told me I would be writing a foreword to a book by Katy Sara Culling I would not have believed it. From the moment I met her on the first day of a new post as a consultant psychiatrist in Oxford and for the next two years as one of my patients she was a constant and major source of concern and stress.
Being responsible for her care as a patient in the inpatient unit in Oxford was highly challenging for the whole team looking after her as she struggled with severe and life-threatening bipolar disorder, coming literally to the point of death on several occasions. I would say that in 20 years in psychiatry she is one of the five individuals who has most challenged me as a clinician, whose management most stressed and divided the clinical team looking after her. Things were not made any easier by her problems with anorexia nervosa.
Five years later, her enduring recovery is a story of hope for all those in the midst of mental illness, a lesson to those who care for them about not giving into despair, retaining hope, and having persistence in treating bipolar disorder even in its most challenging and extreme manifestations.
Getting from near death to publication of this book is a story worth telling and a story worth reading.
Dr. Alan Ogilvie
Medical Director, Equilibrium - The Bipolar Foundation
Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Oxford, UK.