Melody Moezzi

Born in Chicago in 1979, Melody Moezzi grew up mostly in Dayton, Ohio amid a strong and vibrant Iranian-American diaspora. She is a writer, commentator, activist, author and attorney. She is also a United Nations Global Expert with the UN Alliance of Civilizations and an Opinion Leader with the British Council’s Our Shared Future program. Her first book, War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims, earned her a Georgia Author of the Year Award and a Gustavus Myers Center for Bigotry and Human Rights Honorable Mention. She is currently working on her second book, which will be a memoir focusing on her experience with clinical and cultural bipolarity.
Moezzi is a commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and for Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Georgia Gazette. She was a contributor to Montel Across America on Air America Radio and is a blogger for The Huffington Post, Bipolar Magazine and Ms. Magazine. She has made many appearances on CNN and has also appeared on BBC, the Laura Ingraham Show, the Mike O’Meara Show, as well as many other radio and television programs. She was a columnist for Muslim Girl Magazine and her writings have appeared in many publications, including The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, CNN.com, Parabola, the Gulf Times, the American Bar Association, the Malta Independent, the Guatamala Times, the Brunei Times, the Jakarta Post, Dissident Voice, American Chronicle, and the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Moezzi is also a featured columnist for Bipolar Magazine.

HALDOL AND HYACINTHS: A Bipolar Life

In her last year of law school, Melody Moezzi tried to commit suicide. A brilliant and accomplished young woman from a close-knit Iranian-American family, she had long been been struggling with depression and mood swings. But it wasn’t until she was hospitalized in the wake of her suicide attempt that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In retrospect, it was clear: there had been those glorious days and weeks of boundless energy and self-confidence; and there had been weeks where she was unable to get out of bed. But in many ways she had always ‘felt’ bipolar, not just because of her emotional ups and downs but because of her bi-cultural heritage, never quite belonging anywhere, feeling like a stranger in both places. In the psychiatric hospital she was made to feel less than human and it made her angry. She resented the culture of silence surrounding mental illness, particularly in her own community. Long used to speaking out about Islam in America, Moezzi now became an activist on behalf of the mentally ill. She wrote an article for CNN about her suicide attempt which garnered more than half a million hits in days; the overwhelming response made her even more determined to speak out. The result is this compelling memoir, HALDOL AND HYACINTHS: A Bipolar Life. She describes in funny, moving, poignant detail her experiences with the medical establishment; the misdiagnoses; the hours of solitary confinement she was subjected to; the unfeeling treatment she experienced at the hands of the hospital workers; the generally archaic and ineffectual way in which the mentally ill are treated in this country. But ultimately this is not a polemic about the failings of the medical system; it’s the story of a bipolar life.