Mental Illness and
Self-Destruction?
What do you do when you reach the breaking point?
Use My Life Story to Save Lives
Be an Agent for Change
The "breaking point" is not easily locatable; no map will provide coordinates and a GPS is of no value. It is often an end of a journey; sometimes, as in The Other Side of Sanity, it is the beginning. We find our way by good luck; the skill of healers; and, astonishingly, a love of life that can diminish but not be extinguished.
About the Author
I am Daniel Shepley and The Other Side of Sanity is my first novel. It is based in large part upon my real-life experiences dealing with devastating and dangerous mental illness. For a long time I was trapped in an airless world of rage and confusion. I am one of the lucky ones. The not-so-lucky ones are those we read about in the newspaper or see on television who pursue their anger to violent ends. I was assisted in my recovery by Dr. Harvey Rosenstock, under whose encouragement I began to write this book.
I am Pennsylvania born and I graduated with degrees in both aerospace engineering and electrical engineering from Penn State University. After graduating I moved to Houston, Texas, to pursue a career there. I lived in Houston for 31 years and recently moved back to the northeastern United States in order to be closer to my family. Houston is a wonderful and vibrant city, and The Other Side of Sanity is set there. I think of myself as an engineer — numbers not words are my strength — and not as a “creative” writer. But somehow writing my story made sense to me, and I persevered. I discovered, as most writers do, that writing is as much about perseverance as creativity.
This novel is based mostly in fact — there are a few purely fictional elements — and the events described are real and painful. I chose to write it as a novel and not as a memoir for legal and personal reasons, as well as the freedom “fiction” permitted me. It is true to my life and the existential crises I endured and survived. It is not a prescriptive book, but it is a hopeful one, I think. As I say, I endured and survived.
Pass It On
If you enjoy and learn from this book, you have the opportunity to pass it on to others whose lives you could save.
About The Book
Inspired by a true story, pushed to the brink of being a serial killer and suicide by his therapists’ betrayal of his life’s secrets, The Other Side of Sanity is Daniel Shepley’s harrowing account of James Snyder’s – Shepley’s fictionalized version of himself in the novel – rapid descent into, and gradual emergence from, psychosis and madness. It is a disturbing vision of manipulation and betrayal by the people he entrusted to help him recover.
Snyder finds himself in a mental health system under the care of a woman who begins his treatment indifferent to his problems and then more than indifferent, in fact, becomes cruelly manipulative and destructive. The deep and dangerously psychotic state James enters as a result of his incompetent treatment includes ideas of, and plans for, multiple murders and suicide.
It is a story all too tragically common in America today: a disturbed young man, filled with an inexplicable rage, who turns that rage outward and murders.
Snyder at first finds little hope and little help until he discovers his guide through the dark woods of mental illness, Dr. Solomon Janowitz. It is with Janowitz’s patience and kindness that James emerges and assumes the healthy and productive life of a man not “cured,” but healing. It is a remarkable and courageous tale of darkness and light, despair and recovery. In its telling, Shepley has created in Snyder and Janowitz characters of a touching and profoundly moving humanity.