In 1990, I was living with a single roommate, a guy I'd met in scuba class, and we were getting along OK. I had a reasonable number of friends.

Having been manic twice before, I had some idea of how to sense it.

I'd been going to a Unitarian church, which was the focus of my social life, but also had a friend who was attending the same Fundamentalist church that I'd been attending before. I had a lot of religious ideas floating around in my head.

The Unitarian church is the "Unitarian-Universalist" church, and the "Universalist" concept was that there was no hell, everybody gets to heaven. I'd been thinking about that.

On a Thursday, I had a normal visit with my shrink and I told him "I feel that I am at more risk of going manic than at any time since I was hospitalized two years ago." He spoke with me for awhile and told me he didn't think I was manic. But he had me drop by the hospital next door to have a blood sample taken to measure the level of lithium in my blood.

On Friday, the lithium level result came back to his office: it was 0.4. Anything below 0.5 isn't enough to really do the job. Anything above 1.5 is toxic.

But doctors make a lot of money, and some of them, like this shrink, are doing well enough that they only work 4 days per week. He didn't work Fridays. So the lithium level result sat on his desk and no one told me about it.

Having been given a clean bill of health, I started having another conversation with God on Saturday. Having gotten a bit manic and preoccupied with the thoughts I was having, I probably forgot to take my meds, exacerbating the situation. Because I was still partially medicated, the mania was more subtle than had been the previous couple of times.

Somehow I got the idea that there had been a miscalculation, and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross wasn't quite enough. An additional sacrifice was necessary, it would have to come from me, and it would have to happen that night. If I killed myself, everyone in the human race other than me, past, present, and future, including Hitler, would go to heaven. I was guaranteed not to go to hell -- it was unclear whether I'd wind up in heaven or just cease to exist. But at least eliminating the possibility of hell seemed like a pretty good deal, even from a purely selfish point of view. On the plus side, there didn't have to be any pain involved -- I felt I was getting off easy.

I mean honestly, lots of people would be willing to sacrifice their lives to achieve something magnificent. Lots of guys sign up for wars to face a very high chance of dying or being horribly maimed in order to have a tiny influence on the outcome. Compared to that, a sure-fire shot at saving the whole human race from hell and getting them into heaven was a great deal. With no pain at all. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

My thoughts never got racing as uncontrollably as in the first two manic episodes, probably because I was partially medicated. This meant that I could focus on a thought long enough to make an attempt. It also made it harder to recognize that I was manic, especially after my shrink had given me a clean bill of health Thursday.

God said a lot of things to me. Some of them turned out not to be true. He wasn't tormenting me, but he did tell me that if I didn't die, my life would never work out well. I would never achieve happiness. There wasn't much point in not killing myself.

I knew from having talked with a suicide survivor in the mental hospital that sleeping pills by themselves wouldn't do the trick. However, I figured mixing them will alcohol might. I considered taking a lot of my meds, but I was unsure of the outcome -- there would be a risk of rendering myself severely brain damaged, a vegetable but still alive. I took every sleeping pill that I had, about 25-30 of them, and washed them down with a bottle of warm champagne. I thought I ought to leave a note, but somehow I didn't.

To save just a fraction of the human race, Jesus had a die a slow death, and by torture. I, on the other hand, got to save everybody by going to sleep on a comfortable couch! What a wimpy martyr! It was like the Monty Python routine about the "comfy chair" torture. At the time I thought it was really funny that I was getting such a cushy deal. I wasn't really in a bad mood about dying at all. I felt really lucky and honored.

I went to sleep on the couch, and woke up Sunday morning. I wasn't even hung over. I was disappointed not to have saved the world.

I went to the Unitarian church and after the service told a friend there what had happened. He insisted on checking me in to a mental hospital.

It was a very unpleasant stay in the mental hospital. There was no doctor on staff, and since I had overdosed on something, the nurses were instructed not to give me any medication. Being totally unmedicated I was going really insane, knew it, and hated it. I kept begging them for a mood stabilizer and the answer was always the same: "No one here now is qualified to prescribe meds, and our orders from the doctor who isn't here are not to give you anything." I was having very negative spiritual experiences, it was absolute torture.

Most bipolars have a great time when they're manic. Which is probably what whoever was in charge thought when he instructed that I be forcibly deprived of mood stabilizers in a place with no sharp objects. But it would have been nice if they'd bothered to call in between rounds of golf to find out how the hell I was doing.

Also, I knew that the situation I had left at work was very bad. My software was broken and a lot of people needed it and I needed to get back to work and fix it.

Eventually they did give me lithium, I stabilized, and they let me leave the hospital and go back to work after one week, which is a flying pit stop for a hospitalization after a suicide attempt.

I think I would've been justified getting a new shrink after mine screwed up so bad. I was especially angry about being deprived of mood stabilizers against my will in the hospital while he was out playing golf.

Years later, I learned that some psychiatrists believe that severe manic episodes cause irreversible brain damage. If that's the case, then depriving me of mood stabilizers against my will when I was in captivity was serious malpractice.

I stuck with him, but I negotiated some changes:

I didn't get depressed after this episode, probably because I quickly went on the antidepressant that I had found to work back in 1988.

Afterward, I started not getting along so well with the Unitarians. However, I was still hanging around with my friend from the Fundamentalist church. I had lost touch with most of my scuba friends by then. I started going to the Fundamentalist Bible studies. I liked the people there a lot better.

At one Bible study we broke up into small groups and were discussing things, and I told the leader of my small group about my experiences having conversations with God that went badly.

However, he was just a young guy, and concluded that this was totally out of his league to deal with. He had me talk about it with the head pastor. This pastor is now fairly famous, his name is Ray Stedman. I told him my story and he didn't even flinch. He told me that I had been talking to Satan pretending to be God, one of the oldest tricks in the book. He told me that Christians often refer to Satan as "The Accuser".

Years later, I heard, I think it was on the radio, when a lot of Christians were being really, really nasty to gays, Ray Stedman went to a gay conference and stood up in the audience and apologized to them all on behalf of the Christians. If that really happened, I really respect him for doing this gesture.

The experience I had with telling my story to Stedman was completely different than the totally disappointing experience I had had when I talked with the Methodist minister in 1986.

With time, I drifted away from Christianity again, and found other ways to make friends, particularly by joining the Toastmaster's Club at work.

One thing that I realized after that attempt was that, because I didn't leave a note, no one would have had any idea what was going through my mind. All my friends would have wondered if they were personally responsible. If I had left a note they would have known I was just completely insane and it was no fault of theirs. They would have known that at least I wasn't mad at them and had the best of intentions for them all.

After that, I made a rule to live by: Though I thought that the right to kill yourself is an important human right, if you do so, you owe it to the world to leave a note explaining yourself. And if you're not competent to compose a decent note, you're not competent to decide to end your life.