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From Publishers Weekly
Hannon is brave indeed to have written this memoir of his struggle with the manic depression which has afflicted him since high school. But bravery alone doesn't redeem the repetitive and unsophisticated prose that impedes his story. Until 1976 and his senior year in his Washington State high school, Hannon describes himself as "still super-jock, super-brain, and super-smooth compared to now." His mother suffered from manic depression from 1955 to her death in 1981, and Hannon believes his father's possessiveness (Hannon wasn't allowed to date) came from loneliness. Hannon goes on in detail about his life before the illness first manifested itself as an inability to concentrate and trouble swimming, followed a few months later by a manic episode while on a six-week trip to Israel. He was hospitalized there before being moved to another hospital in Seattle. Hannon's struggle lasted for years, and he often faults his early doctors for not prescribing antidepressants and for not discussing his illness with him. He succeeds in making them seem incompetent, but more background on the different pharmaceuticals that became available during the course of his treatment would have been both more convincing and more helpful. An afterword by a psychiatrist and a list of symptoms offer some background.

Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
A few brave souls in the public eye, such as Patty Duke, Kay Redfield Jamieson, and more recently, Margot Kidder, have come forward to reveal something about themselves that they had tried very hard to keep hidden -- the fact that they suffer from a mental illness called "manic depression". Also known as "bipolar disorder", this illness is only dimly understood by the population at large and, unfortunately, misconceptions abound.

In this compelling autobiography, Bill Hannon offers an engrossing first-hand account of living with a serious mental illness and the disturbing delusions and paranoias which rendered him incapable of holding a job or accepting help from his friends and family. From his earliest manic episode during a high school trip abroad to his struggles with mis-diagnoses and the frightening side-effects of prescribed drugs, Hannon guides the reader into a world in which crossword puzzles are coded messages from the C.I.A. and a scrap of masking tape on a car windshield means that his conversations are being monitored.

Never before has an author described his own manic episodes in such fascinating and insightful detail as Hannon does in Agents in My Brain. It is this feature that sets the book apart from all other accounts of manic depression. Agents in My Brain is essential reading for anyone who has encountered manic depression on either a first-or second-hand basis.

"A vivid and often poignant portrayal of what it is like to grapple with the realities of manic depressive disorder". -- Timothy Twito, M.D.

"Agents in My Brain is an outstanding piece of work. I am manic-depressive myself, and Bill Hannon's book really tells it like it is". -- M.A.L.

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