A woman who spent years having three-month bipolar “cycles” of depressive and manic episodes, causing her to think she had been recruited by MI5 as a spy and make multiple suicide attempts, claims “art saved (her) life” and got her out of “an incredibly dark place”. Sarah Graham is “now in remission” and a successful artist, appearing on the GCSE art exam paper as well as producing pieces for celebrities.
The 45-year-old, who lives in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, had her first episode in September 2005, a year after her father died, where she was “paranoid, scared and anxious”, and her depression was “so severe” that she tried to take her own life. At the time, she was “in denial” that she had a mental illness because her “biggest fear” was developing bipolar disorder like her dad, for which he was “sectioned regularly”.
It took Sarah more than a year to recover from her first episode, but, in 2015, she began to “cycle rapidly”, spending “three months being depressed and three months feeling high”, and was diagnosed with bipolar, and attempted suicide. In 2017, she developed more signs of mania, such as thinking she was a spy for MI5, that she could “communicate” with John Lennon, and that she was “foiling a terror plot and thought (she) needed Harrison Ford to help”.
