I am bi-polar. The disease can be managed if properly diagnosed and treated but many seriously ill people do not believe that they are ill and many who know refuse to take their medications because the manic feelings can be so great. You can feel exhilirated and wonderful and get so much done on very little sleep. The trouble is that this can turn into a terrible manic, delusional and anxious state which is so bad that a person cannot bear even to be alive. I have felt suicidal and if I were not properly medicated I probably would kill myself.

Iris Chang may well have had a variant of bipolar disorder called hypomanic-depression. People with this variant, like myself, may display no outward symptoms until we are overwhelmed by a stressor that leads to suicide, a psychiatric ward, or a jail cell. Unlike full-blown mania, hypomania (literally, below mania) can be very hard to recognize because it can be channeled into very creative activities. These activities can also sustain us through the troughs of depression or anxiety.

Unfortunately, hypomanic-depression is not easy to diagnose. At the age of 24 I was treated with "talk therapy" for anxiety that was often debilitating. That was a waste of time. At the age of 40 I ended up in a psychiatric ward with acute psychosis. I was misdiagnosed as having manic-depression, a diagnosis I rejected because I never had the classic symptoms of full-blown mania. Finally, at age 50 I learned about hypomanic-depression through my own research on the internet.

Sadly, I understand very well why Ms. Chang fell through the cracks. We educate our children about STDs but the subject of mental illness is kept locked in the closet. Until many more of us make the commitment to raise awareness about mental illnesses, we can expect to hear about many more tragedies like that of Ms. Chang.

Like the two previous letters, I am bi-polar. I am grateful for books like this because this illness isn't as well known as it should be - and although it seems to hit women hard, I'm a man, and it's just as debilitating for us. In fact, I am waiting to hear if I lose my ability to drive, and to keep my job, because of a manic episode. I've got enough pills to kill an elephant in my gym bag.

Literature is littered with people with problems. I tend to want to ignore their personal stories and focus on their art.

Dear Nullas Salus--

This is fine for you but don't help the artist worth a damn. The artist is, despite the art, an actual human, an actual suffering human in this case.

Mental illness is a problem, but it is not helped by the refusal of our culture to estimate artists as being worth anything until dead. And I mean good artists who know they are good. Imagine the suffering of artists who doubt themselves--and that's most artists.

Sorry. Nulla Sallus.

Hemmingway was a drunk. Robert Lowell was clinically depressed. Sylvia Plath would fade to obscurity if she hadn't killed herself. But what about Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Conner and Katherine Anne Porter all apparently the most well adjusted and emotionally healthy people you could ever meet and yet their work spans the spectrum from romance to hard reality to the nearly psychotic.

...whose name really stood-out in my mind when I heard of her suicide. The Thread of the Silkworm was an excellent and readable introduction to one of the dumbest strategic blunders of the McCarthy era: the deportation of Qian Xuesun, a US-trained rocket scientist who was put under house arrest on trumped-up espionage charges and sent to China, where he almost single-handedly built that country's missile program.

Given the complexity of Chang's life with the dark subject matter of her writings,government pressures and her kid's autism, reducing things to a "bipolar" label is extremely insulting. Once people have a mental illness label attached, everything they do in retrospect is seen as a symptom and unfortunately most mental health professionals would have dismissed her very real problems as nonsense and further evidence that she should just be drugged rather than actually help her with her life. If anything, their so-called "treatment" may have actually caused her demise.

It seems to me, having dealt with friends with bipolar (and other) mental disorders is that first they must be willing to accept that they have a problem. It really is up to them and they can't be forced into therapy or medication.

Another thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is the resentment of people with mental disorders that they must take medication to be "normal."

Some, I know, who have these diseases have accepted their disease and take their medication. But others will take the medication until they feel "normal" and then they put the prescription away.

Still others I know have tried desperately to find a medical solution only to be frustrated because no medication seems to work -- there are so many subtleties and variations to these disorders that the art of a cure is very fine indeed.

There is no easy answer.

I clicked the link to Kamen's essay,"How Iris Chang Became A Verb." Must-reading for anybody who has ever had a friend.

The POW lawsuits, which were filed and dismissed during the Clinton administration, were stirred up by a group of plaintiff's lawyers who had already made several million dollars apiece settling claims by Holocaust forced labor victims (the victims themselves, incidentally, had received about $2500-7500 each in the settlement), and saw Mitsubishi as the next logical financial frontier. They whipped up into an emotional frenzy several elderly WWII vets (Bataan Death March survivors, many of them) and filed about half a dozen lawsuits in the state of California (both in state and federal courts) pursuant to a law conferring jurisdiction over such claims that had been pushed through the California state legislature by Tom Hayden, who was apparently attempting to help Holocaust survivors. The strategy appears to have been: file the lawsuits, the Japanese corporations will cave in and settle just like the German companies did. The plaintiff's lawyers, who seemed to be primarily led by the law firm Greenberg Traurig, were assisted in their political efforts by the DC lobbying outfit Patton Boggs, and eventually by Sen. Orrin Hatch.

Unfortunately for the plaintiffs' attorneys, the Japan Peace Treaty of 1951 had definitively settled the issue of war-related claims, and in fact, many of the POWs they were representing had already been compensated in the 1950s (about $5000 in 1950s dollars) using funds derived from liquidated Japanese assets. Nonetheless, they filed at least a dozen different lawsuits on behalf of these POWs as well as some Korean forced labor victims. One of the federal courts requested the State Department's views on the 1951 Peace Treaty. The State Department filed an amicus brief stating, correctly, that the treaty had settled these claims. Orrin Hatch was unamused.

During the political lobbying that followed, the State Department suggested that interested members of Congress should pass new legislation providing for additional compensation for the veterans, if the sense of the Congress was that they had not been adequately compensated for their mistreatment during WWII. The response was that this was an unacceptable solution, as the plaintiff's attorneys would not be able to collect their fees.

Throughout this legal and political wrangling, the Japanese government was understandably agitated that any re-opening of the 1951 Peace Treaty would also lead to the re-opening of claims by Chinese victims. This would have caused a number of problems for the Japanese-PRC bilateral relationship, which is largely based on the tacit understanding that the PRC will do its best to sweep these wartime liability issues under the rug in exchange for development assistance (the PRC was not a party to the 1951 Treaty).

That said, in the several years of my involvement with these lawsuits, I only remember Iris Chang's name coming up once or twice in casual conversation. I cannot possibly imagine anyone in the U.S. Government being concerned or troubled enough by some book author to bother monitoring her or reading her mail. Orrin Hatch and Dana Rohrabacher on the House side were far more pressing concerns, as neither of them could forego an opportunity to bait the Clinton White House. In addition, there was a flatly erroneous op-ed that was published by Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation in the New York Times, in furtherance of the lawsuits.

I spoke with Paula Kamen shortly after Ms. Chang's suicide, and it was apparent to me that she was already thinking about how to exploit and profit from her "friend's" suicide. So glad to see it's worked out for her.