The book
Make It to Midnight
Learning to Live When You Want to Die
In 2009, Jim Denning’s doctors diagnosed him with treatment-resistant bipolar II, generalised anxiety and ADHD, and told him to go on disability and settle in for a life of struggle. This is the book about what he did instead.
Rated 4.8 out of 5 by 49 Amazon reviewers. That is a rating of the book from its readers — it is not a review of therapy at this practice, and it says nothing about clinical outcomes.
What the book is about
Jim was, by external measures, doing fine. Successful, healthy, intelligent. And unable to explain to himself why none of it touched what he was carrying, or why the treatments he had been given were not working.
What he could not get was an answer to why. So he went looking — into how the brain works, into the gap between what he was performing and what he actually was. The conclusion he reached is the spine of the book: that a great deal of suffering comes from the collision between the thinking part of a person and the feeling part, and that when you spend years contorting yourself to fit an expectation, the conflict has to go somewhere.
It is a first-person account, not a memoir that stops at the story. He includes the tools that got him through and a sequence a reader can actually follow.
“I had no intention of becoming a counselor. But after fixing me, I felt I had to.”
Who it is for
- People who are, right now, trying to get to the end of the day
- People who have been told their condition is treatment-resistant and have taken that as a verdict
- Anyone loving someone in that position and out of ideas
- Readers interested in the mechanics of why the usual advice bounces off
The free companion journal
A seven-page workbook accompanies the book, with the reflective exercises set out to be worked through at your own pace. It is free, and you can use it without having read the book.
Download it from the resources page.
About the author
Jim Denning, MA, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor in San Antonio, Texas, trained in Accelerated Resolution Therapy and EMDR. He holds master’s degrees in counseling and in ministry, and he trained engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before any of this. More about Jim.
Written and clinically reviewed by Jim Denning, MA, LPC. Last reviewed 1 September 2026.
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Reading the book is not the same as being seen
If something in it landed, that is worth following up on with a person rather than a page.