The Better India · 16 hours ago

From Bipolar Diagnosis to Bestselling Author — ‘I Do Not Consider Myself Unwell’

For thirteen years, writer Aparna Piramal Raje lived with a condition that had no name - riding extremes of mood through Harvard, Oxford, and a journalism career, without a map for any of it. When a psychotic episode at a yoga ashram finally led to her bipolar diagnosis, she describes it, surprisingly, as a relief: a roadmap where there had only been wilderness. What followed was two decades of careful, honest work - seven practices she calls "therapies," from medication and sleep she treats as "religion" to the community of allies who turned listening into an art form - that carried her from crisis to a national bestseller and 150 talks on mental health across India. Central to everything was a single realization: "I don't consider myself unwell, even though it is an illness." Her story is less about overcoming a condition than about learning to live with full integrity inside one - and discovering, in that patient labor, that vulnerability, as she puts it, can become a person's greatest teacher.