Four years ago Laura Anne Middlesteadt tried to kill herself.
Today, she's trying to help keep others from making the same mistake.
She has shared her story of recovery and hope in a self-published book, "What Doesn't Kill Us: My Battle with Anxiety."
"I know there are people out there who feel like I did in the fall of 2007," Middlesteadt said. "I just want to reach them and tell them that recovery is possible."
Middlesteadt, 48, who writes under the pseudonym L.A. Nicholson, is a Georgia native who grew up in North Carolina and graduated from UNC Chapel Hill. She said she lived a "charmed life" until she was 38. That year, her 61-year-old mother was killed after being hit by a car while jogging. Her husband got laid off from two different jobs. Then the couple moved cross-country without jobs, searching for a new start.
Before the move, Middlesteadt became apprehensive and nervous. Once she and her husband arrived in Oregon, she felt terrified all the time. Her heart pounded. She didn't want to eat. "I didn't know what was happening to me."
She was feeling the symptoms of what she now knows as "generalized anxiety disorder." But she wasn't officially diagnosed until her life had spiraled out of control.
She and her husband moved back to North Carolina, where her family doctor prescribed an antidepressant, and things settled down. After a while, she felt good enough that she stopped taking the medicine. But again, stressful events brought her symptoms back. In 2007, in the same week her divorce became final, she put her 13-year-old dog to sleep.
Middlesteadt began having headaches, insomnia, jitters. "I was pacing the floor. I was always moving," she said. "It's like someone else is driving your brain."
She saw a psychiatrist and counselors. But prescribed medicines didn't help. She survived an overdose in November 2007. Then two weeks later, she took a razor blade to her throat. "I was very determined to get out of here," she said. "I was given up for dead several times."
She spent weeks in intensive care and then in a psychiatric ward before being released to her father's care in January 2008. She was unable to work, drive, care for her son or live on her own. Her weight had dropped to 93 pounds. But that spring, things began to turn around. With her medicines stabilized, she got stronger. She took up gardening again and bought a house to share with her then-10-year-old son and a new cat. Feeling guilty for what she had put her family through, she was determined to "make it up to everyone."
She still takes an antidepressant and knows she'll need the medicine for the rest of her life. Today, she has become a speaker for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
"I wasn't ready to talk about this at first," she said. But now her message is: "You can suffer through all kinds of setbacks, and you can get better."
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