The Pain
Sings a Song

It is a memoir told in poems rather than chapters, which changes what it can do. Prose memoir tends to explain an illness after the fact, from the safety of having survived it. Poems written during the illness keep the tense wrong on purpose: they are in the middle of it. A reader who is also in the middle of it recognises that immediately, and a reader who has never been near it gets closer than a clinical description would take them.

The seven parts are ordered as a movement rather than a timeline. Part One opens in identity loss and grief. Parts Two through Four move through stigma, depression named plainly, and the pleading that comes before change. Part Five turns anger into a discipline — a poem every day. Part Six is where coping skills, support and hope arrive, and Part Seven closes not on a cure but on a voice regained.

Bipolar disorder is not rare, and it is not mild. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 2.8% of US adults had bipolar disorder in the past year, and about 4.4% experience it at some point in their lives. Of those affected in a given year, an estimated 82.9% had serious impairment — the highest proportion of any mood disorder NIMH tracks. Those numbers describe a condition that reorganises a life, which is what the poems in this book are reporting from inside.

The daily poem in Part Five is not presented here as a treatment. It was one person’s way of staying in contact with herself during a stretch when silence was winning. What the evidence does support is narrower and still useful: NIMH describes psychotherapy — structured talking treatment, alongside medication — as a core part of managing bipolar disorder, and skills-based approaches that teach emotion regulation are an active area of research for it. Reviews of dialectical behaviour therapy in bipolar disorder describe the evidence as promising but preliminary, drawn from a small number of studies. This site will not tell you it is more settled than that.

What writing reliably does is give shape to something formless. A diagnosis arrives as a word from someone else; a poem is a sentence you built. In Part Six the book names the ordinary machinery of staying well — diagnosis, treatment, DBT skills, and the unglamorous habits nobody puts on a book jacket. Shalanda speaks about exactly this material when she is invited into a room.