Ticket to Madland

After decades of smooth sailing in her professional and personal life, business author Jocelyn Davis finds herself caught in a storm of bizarre medical symptoms: patches of itchy pain, spinning vertigo, surging anxiety and, worst of all, a never-ending sensation of being on a boat in rough seas. She seeks help, but the experts have no answers. Teetering on the verge of insanity, weighing methods of suicide, she must rely on herself-her sane self, that is-to marshal resources, unravel the puzzle, and find a way out of the nightmare before it consumes her. Her voyage culminates with two weeks in a locked psychiatric ward. She emerges with a transformed view of mental illness: "another country," as she calls it, with "monsters just like us." Ticket to Madland is a vividly candid, darkly comic account of a high achiever's self-guided trek through excruciating mind-body disease, the characters she meets along the way, and her courageous struggle to lead herself back to health.