"If anyone can prevent even a single child or teenager from repeating the mistakes described in this book, or help a loved one or family member avoid unnecessary future suffering... then my struggles will not have been in vain."
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Imagine being arrested, handcuffed and locked behind the bars of a dark, cold, jail cell. The next day you are forcibly dragged to a downtown high-rise and thrust into a 4'x 8' steel-walled cage. Your freedom has been ripped away, even though you haven't been charged with a single crime. A reporter comes to interview you, so you answer his questions. When returned to your cell, the prison guard tells you, "They are going to lock you up and throw away the key!"
¶
You are driven to an insane asylum where a psychiatrist orders mandatory shock treatments. You are strapped to a gurney, electrodes are stuck to your temples, and a rubber mouthpiece is forced between your teeth. When the first electric voltages pass through your brain, your heart stops. You are revived, then given a series of nine more ECT treatments without anesthesia. Each one feels like a sledge hammer to your head. Your memories fade into a fog, and you feel like a zombie... one of the walking dead. You remain confined indoors and inappropriately medicated for months, because you were misdiagnosed as a drug-induced paranoid schizophrenic. You are a teenage bipolar addict with a mood disorder, OCD, and claustrophobia!
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The torture of your confinement, the shock therapy, and being forced to take massive daily doses of the wrong medication leaves you morbidly depressed and obsessed with suicide. While locked away, your father dies and your girlfriend abandons you. Then one day you are released and simply told to "Have a nice life!"
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More drug abuse soon changes your obsession with your own death into a compulsion... one that leaves the blood squirting from your wrist as cold as the dirt you're lying in, while just waiting and hoping to die. This is my story. --Kerry L. Barger
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The following review was written by Priscilla Estes, a 24-year faculty member at ETSU:
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"Below are my five recommendations to avoid going insane (like I did) and to avoid insuring that you become some kind of worthless, pathetic, immoral, blubbering idiot in the future."
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The cover shows an adorable pre-school cowboy clutching matching six-shooters and grinning at the camera. The Roy Rogers image belies the misery on the pages that follow. What started as a private, therapeutic journal steamrolled into an honest account of a life derailed by grief, drugs, and addictive relationships.
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Barger does not apologize, make excuses or ask forgiveness for the way he lived his life. He merely tells it, exposing warts, pimples and pus. He chose to take drugs, have affairs and break the law. If this were a novel, he would not be a sympathetic main character. And he'd be the first to agree, describing himself as "moral scum," and his need for love "pathetic."
¶
Even so, Barger's unapologetic denigration of self renders him vulnerable and strangely likeable. After all, he didn't choose his broken, alcoholic family; he didn't choose institutionalization and ten electro-convulsive therapy (shock) treatments at age seventeen; he didn't choose genetic mental illness and a deep, gnawing emptiness inside. But he did choose to devote his life to working with the handicapped in state mental facilities in Texas and to write this book.
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Barger's factual style, callous accounts of womanizing and angry outbursts are sometimes uncomfortable to read. A drifting narrative ignores potentially insightful inroads. And the final nine pages, explaining the purpose of the book, should have come first, although we have learned that it is indeed being reorganized for production. The book is a brave chronicle of how not to live and admonishes readers to follow their bliss, go for their dreams, and never give up. --The U.S. Review (www.theusreview.com/reviews/High-Barger.html)

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• Biographies & MemoirsProfessionals & AcademicsSocial Scientists & Psychologists

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