A year ago, she wouldn't have dared open her front door, let alone invite the world in to hear her story.

Yet there Charlene Martin sat Friday morning, ready, willing and, above all, able to look back on what was for years a living hell and announce that she's much better now. Better, in fact, than ever.

"At one point I was taking 12 different medications," Martin said. "Now I'm down to three."

On Thursday, Martin and dozens of other clients of Counseling Services Inc. in Biddeford will hold a rally and award ceremony at CSI's Sherry Sabo Center in Biddeford's Thacher Brook Business Park. The festivities, part of the National Alliance on Mental Illness' Mental Illness Awareness Week, will include the release of a book titled "Recovery is Telling."

Compiled by CSI peer specialist Marjorie Manning Vaughan, the book consists of 30 or so "recovery stories," as told by members of the agency's Wellness Recovery Action Plan.

One of the stories is Martin's. It's anything but easy reading.

When her first son was born 17 years ago, she had Hodgkin's disease. The near-constant radiation and treatment so interfered with her ability to mother that the boy was eventually adopted by Martin's mother and stepfather.

She had two more sons after that, but the relationship with their father didn't work out, and eventually Martin found herself a single parent struggling to get by.

Then she hooked up with another man and got pregnant again. The baby's name was Aiden, and the week after Martin brought him home from the hospital, she was diagnosed with cancer again – this time, in her uterus.

"I had a complete hysterectomy," Martin said. "Cancer happens. You just learn to get over it."

But there was no getting over what happened next.

Early one morning in November 2001, Martin got up just before dawn to check on 14-month-old Aiden and walked right into a nightmare.

"We had his crib pushed right up against the wall by a window," she said. "And he had climbed out of his crib for the first time and got caught between the crib and the window."

Her baby boy was dead. Within hours, Martin's home-turned-potential crime scene was crawling with state and local police. State child protective workers came and, following standard procedure, removed Martin's two other sons from the home.

"It just ripped my life apart," Martin recalled. "It was in the papers. It was just horrific. There were even rumors going around that I had life insurance on Aiden and I was going to get this great windfall.

"In reality, I was on Social Security disability for my cancer, working three jobs trying to get off disability and just trying to make ends meet and support my kids."

Police quickly declared Aiden's death a "tragic accident" and said no charges would be filed. But for Martin, a different kind of trial was just beginning.

"I had a complete and total nervous breakdown," she said. "And I stayed sedated on medication for years, because every time they sought to bring me to the surface without medications, I would completely break down again. I couldn't handle the fact that Aiden had died."

She was hospitalized not once, but many times. Her two boys went to live with their father. Martin, when she wasn't in a psychiatric unit, hid inside her home in Biddeford, afraid to go out or let the world in.

One day, in despair, she emptied two prescription bottles full of sedatives and gulped the pills down with mouthfuls of vodka. A neighbor came by to use Martin's telephone and found her barely conscious on the living room floor.

"She dragged me into the kitchen and stuck her fingers down my throat, and I started throwing up whole pills," Martin said. "The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital, and I was like, 'Where am I?'"

Martin would still be asking that question had it not been for what happened...