After Decades of Unexplained Mood Swings, a Quiet Place to Call Home Kirsten Luce for The New York Times Cheryl McCray, 57, on her new bed after a grant paid for furniture for her studio apartment in Brooklyn. Ms. McCray has struggled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder for most of her life. For the first 54 years of her life, Cheryl McCray did not understand why she flew off the handle and suffered such violent mood swings. "I had it all the time; I just didn't know what it was," she said on a recent morning in her one-bedroom apartment in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Three years ago, while living at a homeless shelter, she learned - finally - that she had bipolar disorder, which affects an estimated eight million Americans. "I would get dressed up every morning and I would stand in a corner and I would cry," which got the attention of mental health workers, Ms. McCray recalled. Medication has calmed her somewhat. But her condition led to rifts within her family, and she has little support. Raised in Brooksfield, a small town on the west coast of Florida, she is the youngest girl of 11 children. By age 15 she had lost both of her parents: Her mother died during surgery for a goiter when Ms. McCray was 4, and her father died of hypertension after years of working in a mine. She moved to New York after high school. "There was nothing here, not even a McDonald's," she said of Brooklyn, her adopted borough. She was working as a home attendant when her son, Toriano McCray, now 39, was born. He moved to Michigan and had four children. In 2009, he was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison for conspiracy and third-degree murder. She cannot afford to call him, so they write. While raising Toriano, she was offered a job as a nurse's assistant at the Department of Correction. She worked on a ship off Pier 36 in Manhattan, on Rikers Island and in the Brooklyn House of Detention. But her career derailed when she was hit by a car near her apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens, and her pelvis was snapped in half. After a year of physical therapy, she joined a welfare-to-work program. She was assigned to a housing project in Brownsville, Brooklyn, teeming with drug dealers. "Scary!" she said. After a falling-out with the sister she was staying with, she moved into a shelter in East New York. "You couldn't let nobody know that you're scared," she said. Crack addicts stole everything in sight, she said, and the bathrooms were foul. But her temper, in this instance, served her well, scaring off potential troublemakers. She was in and out of homeless shelters for the next two decades, staying with her sister on the weekends. After her bipolar diagnosis three years ago, Services for the UnderServed, a nonprofit agency, found her a studio apartment and provided her with furniture. But a glass table shattered when she tried to move it, leaving her without a place to sit and eat. A water leak destroyed her dresser. Coils protruded from her bed, cutting her legs. With her monthly supplemental security income of $817, she could not afford new furniture. During a recent home visit from Community Healthcare Network, a member of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, a worker noticed the state of her home furnishings and obtained a $1,500 grant for a new bed, dresser, sofa and dining table. She does not have a life of luxury, "but this is what I got," Ms. McCray said, beaming. And I love this furniture. Ms. McCray is now focused on her health. She is a candidate for gastric-bypass surgery, and has been working for the past year to fulfill the myriad pre-surgery requirements. One of her sisters died of diabetes, and another suffers from the disease and lives in a nursing home. "I know what I want," she said. This is for my health.