Helena Smole presents her own successful path out of her daily struggle against extreme mood swings, suicidal thoughts, paranoia, and other delusions in her book Balancing the Beast: A Bright View of Schizoaffective Disorder - Bipolar or Manic-Depressive Type. The book describes a unique combination of humor and hard work along with psychiatric medication. The mental exercises, lifestyle choices, and other alternative medicine approaches that she combined with clinically-prescribed medication eventually led to the alleviation of her illness. As shown in the book, her success is to a significant extent due to having fully accepted herself the way she is, the illness included. About the author: Helena Smole is a 36-year-old language specialist who decided to write about mental illness. She believes that the most dangerous stigma is the one mental patients carry around in their heads. Her mission is to make mental illness casual and thus help her co-patients rebuild their self-esteem.