The Story of Channon Rose: Lessons between the Lines by Channon Rose Page A

ways. I could have killed her that night. She laid at the bottom of the stairs and cried. My mom was never one to cry, but she did that night. I do not know if she was crying from the fall, or because of what I had turned into, or both. The worst part was that I was not even slightly fazed by it.
    Even if I had killed my mother that night, I would have felt nothing. I did not care if she was all right or not. I had no feelings of remorse or guilt, no shock, no increase in pulse. I was as calm as could be. I slowly walked back to my room and shut the door. My little sister called 911, and the police showed up around seven minutes later. I remember hearing walkie-talkies and people talking down stairs but in my mind it was as if I was hearing everything on TV. It didn’t seem like it was all actually happening. When the police officers opened my door, he was met with a shocking sight. I had covered every square inch of my white walls in my now emptied out room with disturbing writing and drawings. No one even believed it was possible to draw so much in under 10 minutes time. The officers’ report described an eerie energy, an empty room filled with death threats to therapists, doctors, teachers and family members, and also drawings of mutilated babies and people. I had used a box of crayons, and not one crayon nub remained. It took seven police officers to restrain me that night. I was biting them, kicking them, spitting on them, speaking gibberish and it was as if I had turned into a completely different person. I was a monster. I would have been scared of myself. My own family was deathly afraid of me and they had every right to be. Adrenaline is a deeply powerful thing. When it takes 7 police officers to restrain a one hundred and fifteen pound girl you know that is some crazy strength coming out of a girl. The hospital paperwork read that I was a 14-year-old female, bi-polar, and severely emotionally disturbed with violent outbursts of rage. I was to be on high security watch. I have no memory of any of the police taking me away or the majority of what happened that night. I blacked it all out. In my mind it was like it had never happened. This was all told to me after the incident by other people, including my therapist who was called to the scene.
    My psychologist was sent to my house on an emergency call after I had been carted off to the hospital in full body restraints. They even had to put a mask on my face because if people got close enough to me I would bite them or spit on them. The whole incident was like something out of a movie. My therapist spoke to my now distraught mother and took pictures of my room and outside our house so that she could conduct a study on me. In her 35 years of practice, she had never heard of or seen anything like this before. I had made “crazy” history.
    I was in Northridge Psychiatric Hospital for a long time after that specific incident. Each time I was sent away I was gone for so long. It took a long while for me to recover after being on Prozac for only three days. I was switched from Prozac to Lithium, then Lithium to Depakote, then Depakote to Zoloft, and the list went on. The concept or idea of no medication at all, clearly wasn’t in anyone’s interest but my own. It wasn’t an option in the doctors’ minds, I was too sick. At the age of fourteen, 13 different doctors all from different hospitals had diagnosed me as having bi-polar disorder. All of them were as ignorant as the next; the actual doctors prescribing me the medication never even spent enough time with me in our sessions to know what my true problems were. Instead, they were always in a rush and just prescribed pill after pill.
    I had to attend therapy and speak about my feelings and problems. If I did not talk about them—or tried to trick them into believing that I was better when I was not—they would not let me leave. Being on medication does not always make you well, so as long as you are on it when