How I Survived Nine Years with Mental Illness: 2016-2025

At sixteen, Neil Abella sat in a school library skipping lunch to study, quietly building a system that would eventually break him. What began as perfectionism became pressure, and pressure became crisis. One that would define the next nine years of his life. How I Survived Nine Years with Mental Illness: 2016-2025 is a radical memoir of survival. It spans three psychiatric hospitalisations, two psychotic episodes, a decade of hallucinations, and the slow, unglamorous work of recovery.
It does not offer a cure. What it offers is something rarer: radical honesty from someone who lived through it and chose to document every stage. Structured across four distinct phases: the collapse of identity, survival in transition, reconstruction, and the practical framework that kept him alive.  This memoir takes the reader from a locked high-dependency psychiatric ward in Sydney to a warehouse floor in Regent's Park, from demonic nightmares to a live stage performance, from suicidal ideation at sixteen to clinical discharge at twenty-five.
Neil writes with unflinching clarity about the experiences most memoirs soften: the normalisation of waking hallucinations, the spiritual crisis at the heart of a psychotic relapse, the loneliness of long-distance relationships built on pixels, and the moment he learned that surviving is not the same as living. But this is not only a book about falling apart. It is a detailed account of what actually rebuilt a life from the sleep logs, the journaling, the warehouse routine, the forty-day fast, the friendships that held.
The final chapters offer a practical survival framework drawn directly from ten years of pattern recognition. This memoir is for anyone who has spent time hiding from their own mind, and anyone ready to stop.