"The summer before the seventh grade it got really bad. I tried to run in front of a car, to hang myself, and I overdosed on my meds. Then I started seventh grade. I couldn't handle it. All the kids in the halls and classes, all the noise, the class changes and the schoolwork. I just couldn't handle any of it. So once again, I overdosed on my meds. This time I took more of them and I had to go to the emergency room to have my stomach pumped. It was awful."

After that trip to the emergency room, the angry and desperate mother checked her son into Wasatch Canyons Center for Counseling. Jake, 12 at the time, went kicking and shrieking. It took four workers to carry him to a lock-down room. He screamed for an hour.

But the move was a good one. Child psychiatrist Richard Ferre determined Jake had been misdiagnosed. He actually suffered from bipolar disorder. Ferre tossed out his Zoloft and Ritalin and started him on new medication. Over the next two months of out-patient therapy, Jake started to feel better.

About a year later, Ferre asked Short to speak to Utah legislators considering a mental health bill. The young man was terrified but said he was "ready to start helping myself and others."

He testified, and later the bill passed. One of the lawmakers was a woman who had first positioned herself against the bill, then told Short she'd voted for it because of his story.

"At that point," Jake said, "I knew I had to speak out for myself and other people like me."

That decision, along with careful medical monitoring and family support, seems to have saved Jake's life. The last few years have marked major improvement.

He committed to a few speaking engagements for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), his behavior stabilized, his moods regulated.

There have been some rough moments along the way. His last suicide attempt came during his sophomore year at Brighton High School. But that was also the year he was named Bengal of the Month, which he calls the greatest day of his life.

Phone calls from school to the Shorts started slowing down in Jake's junior year. There were none his senior year, and he started to blossom.

Today Jake works for NAMI and also participates in training sessions for therapists and caseworkers in the Utah juvenile justice system. He is a member of Utah first lady Mary Kaye Huntsman's "Power in You" program, designed to help teenagers deal with turmoil in their lives by sending "ambassadors" to schools to talk about issues including mood disorders, suicide and substance abuse.

He worked hard on a KUED-TV documentary about adolescent suicide and spoke at the film's unveiling this winter.

Jake told his story recently at a local school and pointed out many famous people who fight the ups and downs of mood disorders.