Neat, intelligent, organised...

Ordinary she may appear, but Carol's life is far from that.

Her 57 years have been punctuated by four nervous breakdowns. The first came at the age of 20, the last at 47. And each of them stole four months from her as she recovered in a succession of psychiatric wards.

Carol suffers from severe mental illness, a madness that at times has led her to believe she was the daughter of Jesus and had to save the world, at others to disown her beautiful baby son.

"Society singles out people with mental illness; it fears them," says Carol. "But I don't see why there should be this stigma about madness. I talk about my breakdowns in the same way I would talk about breaking my leg four times. Why not?

"Mental illness is far more common than people think; one in four people have it in some form, yet we talk about in hushed whispers like it's something to be ashamed of.

"So many people have no idea what it is; they think depression is about being a bit sad and that mentally ill people are frightening.

"My view is that the more it is brought out into the open, the better."

For that reason, Carol has chronicled those devastating, dark, crazed times in a book – The Nest of Sanity.

Beautifully written and painfully honest, it is currently available in downloadable form from a website specialising in mental health issues, but is also to be released as a regular book this autumn.

"I have always written, particularly in periods of depression – it's a form of therapy," she says. "It also helps people around me to understand what I'm going through. At the time of madness, it is much harder for friends and family to deal with than it is for me."

It was last year's Off The Shelf literary festival, at which she was helping out, which inspired her to turn her memoirs and poems into a book.

Her accounts of her times of insanity – of believing she was flying down hospital corridors, of ripping plugs she was convinced were bugging devices from their sockets, of believing her home was a bombed and smouldering ruin – make for shocking reading. And what makes them all the more so is the fact that, when she is well, Carol is such a "normal" woman with a regular life – albeit one who talks a great deal!

"I know it's my failing - I never shut up! It drives people mad," she says, chuckling at the joke.

Unlike the archetypal image of the madwoman, alone, living in squalor and self-induced neglect, Carol lives in her lovely Victorian house in a leafy street off Ecclesall Road with her "calm, easy-going" husband of 30 years, who knew of her condition when they met. And she has held down her career for 33 years.

The community development librarian for mobile libraries in Handsworth says: "As a child I devoured books and the library was such a peaceful place.

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