I am 41 and what most people would call an overachiever: obsessive, intellectual and part of the dreaded cultural elite. I am strong-willed, determined, opinionated and extremely headstrong. I would never consider asking anyone for help. And yet, it happened to me. As Zelda Fitzgerald wrote to F. Scott, "It is ghastly losing your mind" -- but sometimes that is your only option.

If you're going to do it, you might as well do it the right way. And you should know that you are in good company. Susan Sarandon recently admitted to Barbara Walters that when all her life myths were shattered, she had a nervous breakdown and had to reinvent herself. And Otto Friedrich in his 1976 book "Going Crazy" lists such real and imagined luminaries as Robert Schumann, Jean Seberg, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, King Lear, Hamlet, Caligula, Sherwood Anderson, Martin Luther, Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill, Elizabeth Taylor (both on- and off-screen), Patty Duke (both on-and off-screen), Virginia Woolf and Vaslav Nijinsky.

And there's the dean of the disorder, William Styron, who wrote a book called "Darkness Visible" about his experience with depression and breakdown. Having realized that most of the characters in his own books suffered nervous breakdowns, (think Sophie in "Sophie's Choice"), Styron was unaware that he was writing the blueprint for the course that his own life would take. Trying to share a common bond with those who have experienced this phenomenon, and understanding that there is no shame in it, Styron pinpoints the beginning of his breakdown to the loss of his mother at an early age.

But it's not as practical a tome as I would have needed. My experience can serve as a handy guide to those of you out there on the verge. See, I'm like you. I'm a hard worker. And I don't do drugs, drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. I smoked marijuana three times and did inhale, but never found it intellectually stimulating. I tried therapy three times and, besides feeling smarter than my therapists, thought it was a waste of good money. It was more therapeutic to save the money. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa and have an MFA. I have been a professor of humanities at NYU for the past 18 years.

So when my breakdown crept up at age 35, it was the last thing I ever thought could happen to me. But in retrospect, it could have been predicted. I had lost several close friends in the space of three months; before I could grieve for one, another would be dying. "Multiple grieving syndrome," psychiatrists call it. Holocaust survivors have it. I buried myself in my work. I acted as if their deaths didn't affect me.

At the same time, the person I was dating decided that it was time to leave me. Although I am fine alone, intellectually I could cope with losing friends in death but could not understand somebody just leaving. I started to grieve for all my friends at once. This led to an all-out collapse, or nervous breakdown.

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