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A Promise of Hope: The Astonishing True Story of a Woman Afflicted with Bipolar Disorder and the Miraculous Treatment That Cured Her

by Autumn Stringam

In 1996, an unlikely pair from northern Alberta – Tony Stephan, an engineer with a bipolar wife and two severely bipolar children, and David Hardy, an animal feed salesman – took a nutritional supplement for agitated pigs and adapted it for human use. The supplement went on to locally outperform all conventional anti-psychotic drugs in curing manic depression.

While doctors and scientists cried foul, the two men – along with Stephan’s now-healthy bipolar daughter, Autumn Stringam – stood by the efficacy of the supplements, eventually winning over Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Charles Popper and Dr. Bonnie Kaplan, a research psychologist at the University of Calgary. We won’t know until there are controlled clinical trials if the vitamin/mineral approach to mental health is a fluke or a panacea, but Stringam hopes to at least help raise awareness through this book.

The strength of Stringam’s memoir of her miraculous rise out of mental illness lies in her poignant descriptions of the psychotic ebb and flow of life before the supplements. She recalls the summer her mother climbed the municipal water tower near their home and hung from her ankles high above the town, and the time Stringam fought back her own thoughts of death by firing up a belt sander and stripping the top of her new dining room table, only to retreat into a thick blanket of sleep and sadness.

The story bogs down when Stringam chronicles every last detail of her family’s battle to prevent Health Canada from reclassifying the vitamins as a drug – a move that would have made taking them illegal. Much of this could have been pared down or even excised. Stringam’s story is an important one that deserves better.

 

Reviewer: Alison Garwood-Jones

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 304 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-00-200884-6

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2007-9

Categories: Memoir & Biography