NO EXIT

Jessica Dolin tried, but she couldn't conquer the mental illness that claimed her life.

Liz Spikol

When I first learned I had bipolar disorder, I was too sick to do anything other than crawl from day to day. But in 1995 I decided to reach out a little, and I signed on to an email list called Pendulum, which was created so people with manic depression could share their experiences. I wasn't much for writing then, but when I bought a baby lop-eared bunny I wrote to tell the people on the list how incredible it was, in the midst of all the chaos in my mind, to hold the rabbit and feel its heartbeat against my fingers. It brought back the wonder of life I'd lost after so many years of being suicidal. In writing that email, I felt I finally had something to offer. I hadn't felt that way in a long time.

Aside from Pendulum, I often looked at a photo essay by Boris Dolin, a photographer who documented his sister Jessica's struggle with mania on his website Catching a Darkness. Much of Jessica's experience--delusions of grandeur, poor judgment, hypersexuality--were what I'd gone through myself. The website made me feel less alone, and I counted Jessica--and Boris--among my friends.

Jessica Dolin grew up in Portland, Ore. She was energetic and friendly, but in her sophomore year of college she had a psychotic break and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That's when her brother started taking pictures.

One photo on Catching a Darkness is of Jessica walking down the street wearing a ripped nightgown and carrying a guitar. She believed she was Janis Joplin. Jessica didn't know how to play the guitar, and she sang loudly in a voice filled with anger. The moment he took the picture, writes Boris, "I think I caught a little bit of the fear in my sister's eyes."

Another photo shows Jessica sitting on a lawn selling her belongings. Boris writes, "Luckily no one came to my sister's sale, most likely because they were too scared to come too close." That social alienation seems partly what made Boris so sad.

It was interesting to me that Jessica was able to make a recovery only by taking medication. Nothing else worked for her. She hated Lithium--as did I--because it dulled her feelings. But every time she went off her medication--which she did more than once--it resulted in relapse and chaos.

In a recent cover story on Jessica in Portland's Willamette Week (where I got the details of her life beyond the website), Chris Lydgate writes of Jessica's eventual embrace of her meds: "She took her medications religiously ... even though they made her gain the pounds she had run so far to lose, stiffened the muscles she had worked so hard to build, sallowed her face and made her hair fall out. She swallowed them even though they walled her off from the mania, the beautiful crystalline high that had once sparked through her brain and made her feel like the center of the universe. It was hell--but it worked."

On Catching a Darkness, Jessica writes, "Now that I'm on Depakote, Risperdal and Wellbutrin, I have found the right balance. My head is clear, and I possess life energy again. I have hopes and I have dreams. I am confident they will come true."

And she did manage to carve out a successful life for herself. She finished college, worked steadily at a job she liked--albeit as a professional dominatrix--and had a meaningful relationship with her partner, April.

But this past May Jessica committed suicide. Unlike some suicide attempts that seem haphazard or accidental, Jessica's attempt was quite serious. She took sleeping pills, slit her wrists and put a plastic bag over her head.

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As anyone who's ever tried to kill herself knows, Jessica wasn't taking any chances. I wonder now if when I put a plastic bag over my head, I knew I wasn't going to die. I could have slit my wrists also to make sure I would--but I didn't.

Jessica clearly wanted to die. Given the circumstances of her life in the months before her death, it seems the mania might have been coming back. It's hard, as her father Leigh Dolin admits, for family members to distinguish mania from happiness, and it keeps them in a nervous, watchful state: Which is it? Sickness or health?

It's difficult to say what Jessica was going through. She seemed healthy and happy, but was her work as a dominatrix evidence of grandiose delusions, bad judgment and hypersexuality?

If she knew the mania was coming back, that alone may have been enough to cause her despair. As Virginia Woolf wrote in her suicide note when she felt her depression returning, "I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times." Maybe Jessica felt the same way.

I feel very sad about Jessica's death. It makes me realize that no matter what your family does, what the doctors dream up, what job you take or partner you choose, sometimes-- certainly not always--the disease is stronger. Jessica Dolin was one of the strongest, bravest people I ever "knew." But this time, the illness won.

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