I feel like we are demonized and ostracized and thinking there’s something wrong with us, instead of thinking maybe there is something good with us. – Mark Colella
Imagine running out of a hospital, jogging four and a half miles to a major league baseball field, illegally climbing the gates, walking down to the field and running bases that weren’t there.
For Mark Colella, 45, of Newbury Township, this was just a day in the life of a man with bipolar 1 disorder having a manic episode.
“I did not slide into home, but in retrospect, I probably should have taken the once in a lifetime opportunity,” Colella jested. “I used a park pay phone and called home for a ride. I rescaled the gate and waited for my ride. I had gotten away with breaking and entering, but what was really breaking was my mind.”
That incident, in October of 1994, marked the moment Colella knew something serious was going on in his mind.
Prior to that point, he said he was a “pretty normal” college student at Kent State University. In fact, Colella was involved in a fraternity and in several school clubs.
He had a good relationship with this three other siblings, Dan, Serena and Connie.
“And then I got into a car accident,” he said, explaining he was in the back seat of a car with his fraternity brothers when another vehicle rear-ended them.
He said a few minutes after the accident, he began to feel strange, as though he was losing feeling in his legs. He was taken to a nearby hospital and after some X-rays, was released.
“When I got home, I couldn’t sleep and the back of my head was throbbing,” he said, adding he went back to the hospital, but began getting irritated with the staff members.
“My defiance for authority and the law, which was out of character for me, grew. A few days later, I … ended up at a Cleveland-area hospital for some follow-up work after the car accident,” Colella said. “I hadn’t been sleeping much, if any, which gave me a short fuse. This was completely new to me. My mother, probably through no fault of her own, upset me at the hospital, so I ran out of there, continued running four and a half miles to what was then called Jacobs Field during the major league baseball strike.”
After Colella’s stint at the baseball stadium, he recalled being filled with energy and over-brimming confidence that seemed to come out of nowhere.
“I felt like I could do anything,” he said. “Sounds like a good time, right? It is … until the whole world comes crashing down on you.”
Colella ended up back in the hospital for complications related to his car accident, however, the doctor told him he was more concerned about Colella’s mental state.
“I immediately took offense to this doctor’s comment and, once again, headed for the exit. But just as I was about to escape, I was intercepted by my brother and brother-in-law,” Colella said, adding hospital security soon joined in and he was placed in a locked room in the ER.
“I noticed the bed in the room had wheels, so I began using it as a ramming device to break down the door,” he recalled, explaining he was then placed in restraints and given a shot of a sedative to calm him down.
Colella took a psychiatric exam with 500 questions, which he said showed he was highly paranoid. His initial diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia, but was later changed to manic depressive/bipolar 1.
After that incident, Colella was placed on medication, but he felt like he couldn’t fit into his current life anymore.
“I couldn’t be around large crowds of people. I also couldn’t concentrate,” he said. “So I dropped out of that semester at Kent State not knowing if I would ever be able to return.”
Colella did return, however, and graduated in 1996, he said.
During the summer of 1995, as his hospital bills started piling up from the year prior, Colella began to stop taking his medication and lied to his family about it.
“That’s when it all started again, sleeping less and less each night,” he said.
Colella had another manic episode, his strange behaviors setting off alarms with family members. He was taken to the hospital again, got back on his medication and over the next two years, as he stabilized, slowly weaned off of them.
Colella said he stayed stable for several years, performing as a stand-up comedian, which helped him channel all of his energy.
“I think that I was using all my energy to write jokes and perform a lot,” he said, noting he was named best local stand up comedian by “Cleveland Magazine” in 2003.
Colella had his third episode in 2005 while living with his first wife in Savannah, Ga.
He had entered a stand-up comedy competition in Cleveland and won.
“My ego was boosted to new heights and that night, delusional thinking began to set in,” he recalled, adding he stayed up the whole night and then drove 12 hours back to Savannah.
He began feeling as though he was the second coming of Christ.
“That’s how far down the rabbit hole I was, but I was keeping those grandiose thoughts to myself,” he said.
However, as his strange behaviors increased, including leaving an outlandish tip for an entertainer, believing he could bring dead fish back to life on the beach and throwing his cell phone into the pool, his in-laws, wife and law enforcement stepped in.
Colella and his wife moved back to Cleveland and he started working as a peer support specialist for what is now Signature Health from 2006 to 2015.
Colella, who got divorced during that time and remarried in 2016 to Kristen Colella, has had five more bipolar episodes since then, two in 2014 — one depressive, one manic — and three in 2015.
“In 2015, I started hallucinating demonic things. As I interpreted it, it was the Devil,” he said. “It would show up in patterns … in the grain in the wood, in people’s faces, on the computer screen.”
Colella said the hallucinations were visual and physical.
“I felt like I had a backpack of 40, 50 pounds on my shoulders,” he said. “I felt like it had weight to it, physical weight.”
He knew he needed help, so he saw a priest in Painesville and his soon-to-be-wife and good friend also intervened and got him into the hospital, where he was put on a new medication that would help with the hallucinations.
Colella continues to take his medication, but is also pursuing a career in the holistic health industry, recently becoming a Reiki Master and learning about other healing modalities and approaches. He is also currently writing a book about his experiences.
Colella said he tends to view his bipolar disorder differently than most people.
“I don’t think of it as a bad thing, I think of it as a gift … for me anyways,” he said. “I felt a very strong connection with the spirit realm (during my episode in 2015). I think there’s this whole awakening happening on this planet, and bipolar is kind of being misunderstood in the psychiatric community.”
Colella hopes people with mental health challenges stop feeling ashamed of them and, instead, feel proud of the adversity they have overcome.
“I think it’s more of an awakening process that’s happening and people are being misdiagnosed or thrown medication at them when they might just need someone to talk to,” he said. “I feel like we are demonized and ostracized and thinking there’s something wrong with us, instead of thinking maybe there is something good with us.”
Colella said he hopes to bring all of his skillsets together to help more and more individuals with mental illness thrive in their lives.
“I’m really trying to be an advocate for folks so they don’t feel so alone,” Colella said, adding he speaks to psychiatric patients at University Hospitals Geauga Medical Center for the National Alliance on Mental Illness twice a month, giving them survival tips and telling them who to call when in crisis.
“For example, when someone is having a mental health crisis, it’s good to ask for a crisis intervention team trained officer,” he said, adding he has been involved with CIT training in Cuyahoga County since 2007.
“It’s turned into this whole thing now where people approach me afterwards and sometimes they’re in tears … sometimes they’re just like, ‘Thank you.’ It’s been this myriad of responses and I really look forward to it now and I really like connecting with folks who have mental illness like myself and they think they’re alone, but they’re not. I encourage them to battle stigma by speaking out about their illness so the person next to them won’t be as apt to make a snide remark or response.
“The more we get it out there that people are suffering … and I really think it’s starting to hit the mainstream. The more we collaborate as a unit, the better. Take adversity and make it a plus instead of a minus, make it a positive.”
