High Tide Low Tide

(5/26/2003)

Born in East Java in 1978 to a Turkish father and an Indonesian mother, Nadiye Coskuner's life appeared to be charmed. Possessing a precocious intelligence, strikingly beautiful, and born to an entrepreneurial family able to provide her with outstanding educational and travel options, the road ahead looked to be filled with endless wonder and opportunity.

Unfortunately, Nadiye's daily life was also pursued by what Winston Churchill aptly labeled as "the black dog" of despair and depression. A happy childhood gradually ceded to teenage years ravaged by increasingly erratic behavior and violent personality swings that cost her friendships, educational opportunities, and her grip on sanity.

Doctors, both in Bali and overseas, treated her condition with a smorgasbord of powerful drugs whose side effects, both physically and psychologically, were equal in their devastation to those visited upon her by her illness.

Traveling on what appeared to be a course of certain self-destruction, contact was eventually made with an integrative doctor in the U.S.A. who helped her to understand how the chemical imbalances that feed the bi-polar personality can be controlled through careful attention to diet and nutritional supplements of vitamins and amino acids.

In her self published auto-biography, High Tide Low Tide, Nadiye traces the course of her illness and her eventual recovery of control over her daily life. Her book shares the pain and humiliation of recalled extreme past behavior and its effects on friends, family and school mates. Courageously and with an eloquence beyond her years, Nadiye shares her story in the hope that those suffering from the modern epidemic of bi-polar disorder and depressive conditions will find strength and guidance in her words to overcome their affliction.

An inspiring read.