Losing Kali

Kali Rae Wheeler is growing up in Newport Coast, an affluent section of Orange County, is part of a picture-perfect family, and has plenty of friends. She is an A-student, varsity athlete, and superlative-holding 8th-grader. Her future is gleaming bright. As an indigo child, Kali is gifted, but she is also hypersensitive. When Kali's sister is taken to therapy after her best friend ends up in the ER due to alcohol poisoning, the therapist requests an appointment with Kali. Not knowing she needs to hold anything back, Kali unloads her complex emotions onto the bewildered therapist. The appointment results in a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication, foreshadowing the drugged-out years to follow. Years later, an adverse reaction to a reckless prescription of Prozac leads to a faulty diagnosis of bipolar disorder, thus beginning the destructive, and at times tragic path into Western medicine's pharmaceutically-driven industry. Still searching for her place in the world, but now under the veil of ever-shifting prescription drug combinations, Kali spirals just in time to head into her toughest years of high school.