I don't feel that any of my greatness has been covered over.

I think I existed on four hours sleep a night for four years.

The lows were absolutely horrible. It was like falling into a manhole and not being able to lift the lid and climb out.

Well, I think it's important to stand as an advocate for the mentally ill.

For people with mental illness, taking care of the body is not an automatic thing. The mind is in such chaos it's hard to come up with a plan. So to people like us, it's more important than ever to follow a regimen.

As a teenager, even as a younger girl, I had some depression but no one really noticed that it was depression nor did I know in those days that that's what it was but I did feel different from other people.

My quality of life is more amazing than I ever could've imagined in those 20 years of struggling with illness. In those 20 years, I did not know the meaning of the word hope. It was just a bleak, difficult existence. With all the gifts, with all the successes that I had, it was still an incredibly bleak way of living and I want to be a messenger of hope.