Editor's note: This is the first in a series of columns on mental illness by Seacoast Media Group copy editor/page designer Herb Perry. His struggle with schizoaffective disorder and its effect on his family was chronicled in the Herald Sunday last year. Perry's column will run every other week in the Herald's health & science section.

In the Oct. 1, 2006, edition of the Sunday Herald, my wife, Kathy, my elder daughter, Jennifer, and I each wrote first-person articles about how we deal with my mental illness. I suffer from schizoaffective disorder, which is characterized by a combination of symptoms of schizophrenia and an "affective mood disorder." People with schizoaffective disorder exhibit the primary symptoms of schizophrenia (such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior), along with symptoms of major depression or a manic episode.

Dozens of people responded to our stories, stopping us on the street to talk, telephoning us at work and at home or sending us e-mails -- some writing from as far away as Australia and India. Obviously, people with mental illness and their loved ones are starving for information -- and for hope. Occasionally through my story, but mostly from the stories of other people with mental illness, I hope to delve into the unique challenges they face and how they cope.

One caveat: I know my illness well, but I am not a doctor. So while I will provide information from medical professionals about mental illness, I am not qualified to give medical advice. If you suspect that you or someone you know could be suffering from a mental health crisis, please contact your local hospital's emergency room, or consult organizations that provide 24-hour crisis hotlines such as Seacoast Mental Health in Portsmouth and Exeter, at 431-6703 and 772-2710, respectively; and Counseling Services Inc., in Maine, (888) 568-1112. Your primary care physician can also help you. Future columns will explore how a person can tell if he or she -- or someone else -- needs mental health treatment.

Here is one family's story:

In April 1985, Kim Perham, 28, a married woman with two young children, was on top of the world. She had just returned to Maine after appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America" in New York City where Phyllis George had interviewed her about the sextuplets she was carrying. Perham received worldwide attention and good wishes from friends and strangers alike.

But she had a problem.

"I thought I was pregnant, and I wasn't," she told me one cold, gray January day as she sat in her York home. She wore a blue shirt adorned with large white snowflakes. Tightly curled hair framed her round face, which showed little emotion, but her speech was animated.

"It was a fabricated story," she continued. "It wasn't real. But I believed it and my family believed it."

As the saying goes, it was all in her head. Kim was delusional, and once the media found out her story was not true, they pounced on a more intriguing story ""-- her madness. Kim's husband, Dick, remembers the time well.

"When the truth came out that this was all just in my wife's mind, the turn-about by the people who were so supportive of us before was staggering. I had to admit my wife into a hospital under a false name to protect her. I had to stay with my parents and could only go to our home during my lunchtime at work because of the media frenzy."

The episode signaled the onset of mental illness for Kim. Doctors at Exeter Hospital diagnosed her with major depression. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, "major depression is a serious medical illness (that) ... (u)nlike normal emotional experiences of sadness, loss, or passing mood states "¦ is persistent and can significantly interfere with an individual's thoughts, behavior, mood, activity, and physical health. Among all medical illnesses, major depression is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and many other developed countries."

During her first hospital stay, Kim walked to a drug store, bought a bottle containing 100 Tylenol tablets and swallowed all of them while drinking Diet Pepsi. She then walked back to the hospital, where the staff members noticed her beet red face. They pumped her stomach, but not before she suffered liver damage. The incident introduced her to another stage in her illness: She was hearing voices. And the voices were telling her to hurt herself.

Doctors transferred her to Jackson Brook, a mental health hospital in South Portland, Maine. After four weeks there, she came home.

"I was absolutely miserable," Kim said about that time. "I was like a lion in a cage. I paced back and forth. It was awful."

She tried committing suicide several times over the next two years. Her doctors prescribed several medications. How effective were they? "I don't know," she said. "I was just so far gone it didn't matter. I just existed. I was empty."

In 1987, she went into unexplainable remission, no longer needing medications or counseling. "I was fine," she said.

Ten years later, she shaved her head and started telling people she was suffering from cancer.

"Dick never questioned this," she remembered. "I was his wife. You're supposed to trust your spouse." But her pastor from York Street Baptist Church sat her in a car, put his arm around her shoulders and said, "I love you. The church loves you. But you don't have cancer."

She was admitted to Portsmouth Hospital and stayed there for three weeks.

"I had this thing that I needed out," she said about that stay. "Every time the door opened, I went out." She remembered walking to a nurse's station and sweeping her arms across a counter, clearing everything off it.

"I was off the wall," she said. Staff members gave her shots of Thorazine and put her in the quiet room. "I guess they had to lock me in." Doctors sent her to the N.H. state mental hospital in Concord, and the Maine state mental hospital in Augusta.

Her life began to improve when she started attending meetings at Counseling Services Inc., in Kittery, Maine, in 1998 for women with depression, and again in 1999, when she started attending meetings of NAMI-Family York.

In 2003, Kim became president of the chapter, began running its monthly meetings and learned to teach NAMI courses for people with mental illness and their caregivers.

Her diagnoses have changed through the years from depression to schizophrenia, to multiple personality disorder and then anxiety disorder, and finally to schizoaffective disorder. Doctors have treated her with numerous medications -- with their attending side effects ""-- and she has suffered through electro-shock therapy, which damaged her long- and short-term memory.

Two years ago, the voices in her head stopped talking.

"Recovery is a job," she told me. "I struggle every day with not wanting to get up and do something. It's hard work to do that, to get out into the world and do things. I still hibernate once in a while."

Last year, she received NAMI Maine's Heidi Whitehouse Award as mental health Consumer of the Year, and the state organization recognized her chapter for raising the most money during NAMI Walks charity event.

As the NAMI chapter president, Kim tries to help people. "I talk to them, listen to them. Tell them my opinion. Give back what I've taken over the years. It makes me feel good to think it's very healthy."

She told me her "recovery pie" consists of three slices: the emotional, physical and the spiritual. She said, "I prayed to God (about my illness): Lord, take it away. Make me whole.' And it happened. And I'm here."

Herb Perry can be reached at hperry@seacoastonline.com. Read about his struggle with schizoaffective disorder at www.seacoastonline.com/news/10012006/nhnews-a-o1-schiz-intro.html.