When Carol Emery’s son, Colin, was 11 years old, he started to show signs of what she’d come to learn was paranoia — though she and her husband, Bob, didn’t know it at the time.

“We thought his behavior was odd, but the word ‘paranoia’ never crossed our minds. He used to come home and search the house. I would ask, ‘What are you looking for?’ and try to get him to open up. And he said, ‘I think (my stepfather) is spying on me.’ And I just laughed because it seemed like a funny thing to say. I assured him that he wasn’t spying on him, and I’ll make sure he doesn’t,” said Emery, a longtime San Anselmo resident.

Raising her son in Marin, she watched him blossom into a “brilliant young man,” seeing him succeed in academics and participate and thrive in sports at then-Drake High School. But, she would come to learn that the high highs and the low lows she saw him go through as a teenager had a name: bipolar disorder.

“We had a hard time really seeing that he had bipolar disorder. And, evidently, acing tests and being on the football team and tennis and all the things that he did were part of the manic part of being bipolar. And we saw it as just being a very successful young man. So, even with my knowledge about ups and downs, we couldn’t see it,” said Emery, who also has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

It’s an honest and forthright journey the retired operating room nurse details in her book “Son on the Run,” which is based on her son’s journey with paranoia, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia told from her perspective.

The cover shows a man running who looks similar to her son. The “divine intervention” of finding such a close resemblance was not lost on her.

“It was inspired, I think, by a power greater than myself,” said Emery, who grew up in Fairfax.

Unexpected loss

For Emery, this book began as a way for her to navigate the unexpected loss of her son in December 2020. He died in his sleep from a heart defect at 34 years old.“I started out just rereading my journal. I created a journal and I decided that I need to put these things down on paper because it was so unbelievable what happened. And it helped me process the whole story,” she said. “Then, I realized that there’s really no support at all for schizophrenia and I thought, maybe somebody will learn something and be able to relate to the book. So, that’s why I decided to get it published. That was hard to do because it was so personal, but it felt like it was necessary. But I’ve gotten so much positive feedback and I’m very hopeful it’ll help others who are going through similar things or are affected by mental illness.”

While she feels that there’s an increasing visibility surrounding mental health issues, she still feels there’s a lot of stigma overall, especially toward schizophrenia.

“Schizophrenia still has a really bad connotation, and nobody admits that they are schizophrenic,” said Emery, whose son started getting hallucinations before he turned 30 years old when he was in Cambodia. It would soon progress to psychotic episodes, hearing voices and channeling different personalities.

The title of the book references how he felt the FBI, CIA and Mafia were after him, following him wherever he went.

‘He was very intelligent’

After graduating high school, Colin went on to attend the University of California at Davis, majoring in biology and genetics.

“I think the most proud I was was when he was at UC Davis, and he was finishing college and he took the MCATs, the medical college admission test. And he scored 99% on it. He had a photographic memory and he taught medical students how to pass the MCAT on their first try. He was very intelligent,” she said.

He would go to intern at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco as a perfusion assistant for the open heart program and help organize the first virtual classes for Kaplan, which allowed him to teach virtually while exploring the world.

“I give examples of how I reacted to all of his travels in a very realistic way. I had a lot of bipolar problems as a result of his actions, and I portray them very realistically,” said Emery of his travels to Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Cambodia, Vietnam and beyond.

It wasn’t easy for Emery to look back on her son’s life and, in turn, hers. But, Emery, who is an Alcoholics Anonymous member and has been sober for 18 years, was able to look back on both of their abuses of drugs and alcohol and recognize how it played a role in their journeys.

“I have since learned that drugs and alcohol are directly related to mental illness and they are used to pacify the ups and downs and uncomfortableness of mental illness,” she said. “I’m in AA and that’s a help because the medication works a lot better when you’re not medicating yourself.”

These days, she finds comfort creating jewelry (semipreciousbycarol.com), a passion she discovered more recently after being gifted a small box with beads inside it as a holiday present.

She’s sold her work through Marin Open Studios and other fairs, as well as online.