Photos by Sam Dean The Roanoke Times

Jessica Thomas, 22, will receive her undergraduate degree in sociology from Hollins University today.

Jessica Thomas has the Turkish words inanc (faith) on her left wrist and dua (pray) on her right.

Jessica Thomas' college graduation today doesn't just mark the end of a phase of academics. It also culminates her recent success over another, more immediate hurdle.

Thomas, 22, of Reston will receive her undergraduate degree in sociology from Hollins University today. But a little more than a year ago, she was bound up by the emotional highs and lows of bipolar disorder. To get free, she reached out to family, friends and the school's staff.

"It's often the tragedy that help is there and students won't get it," said Jane Hundley, counseling coordinator at Hollins, and the person to whom Thomas turned when her issues reached their sharpest peak.

Thomas was 11 years old when she was diagnosed as bipolar, but at the time she had other things to worry about.

At 14, she went into rehab for drug and alcohol addiction. At 15, when most kids are starting driver's ed, she was attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

"I grew up pretty quickly," she said, preferring not to discuss the specifics of her substance abuse.

"Things crashed at a level that it wasn't hard to understand there was a real problem," said her father, John Thomas, 56, vice president of a Northern Virginia consulting firm. "The extraordinary tough love of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] and NA probably was the only way she would take on some of the messages."

His daughter puts it more directly: "The motivation was realizing my life falls apart when I drink or do drugs."

Thomas has seven years sober now, which she notes with both pride and ceremony -- her right shoulder bears a series of daisy tattoos, "one for each year I've been clean."

Springing off that fresh start, she followed an older sister to Hollins and thrived.

LeeRay Costa, Thomas' academic adviser at Hollins and associate professor of anthropology said Thomas took unique approaches to assignments and the research topics she chose -- female suicide bombers; soccer hooliganism in the United Kingdom; Harley-Davidson riders of the Roanoke Valley.

"She went on rides with them ... seemed to really develop some great friendships," Costa said.

When Thomas studied abroad two years ago, Costa said, she didn't "take the safe path and go to Paris or London." Instead she went to Turkey and came back "a changed person, matured."

But something was amiss. For years, Thomas took a heavy regimen of pills for her disorder that included multiple medications. In the spring of 2008, the treatment started to chafe.

"When you take eight pills a day for years, it wears on you," she said. "I felt chained. Once in a while, I would test the waters. Finally I decided I didn't need them anymore."

Hundley said it's not uncommon for bipolar students to go off medication -- often because of schedules, social pressure or self-diagnosis. Some can coast along for years, but for Thomas life quickly went awry.

Despite her family's objection, she suddenly moved back to Istanbul, teaching English to support herself and attending Turkish NA meetings even as she skipped her meds. When she returned to campus months later, she felt dislocated. Insomnia kept her awake for days, then she'd crash. She missed classes, then obsessed over missed classes. Simple decisions became emergencies, she said.

"My highs were scary for some people," Thomas said. "It was a gradual sinking into depression."

Shannon Fox, her roommate during that period, characterized their friendship as full of music and laughter -- driving for hours in Thomas' pickup truck, listening to classic rock -- but levity soon became scarce.

"She was crying ... for reasons I couldn't really understand," Fox said. "It was really, really scary."

Last March, after a year off her meds, suicide started to creep into Thomas' thoughts. She realized she had to get help.

Thomas found Hundley, who convinced her to see a doctor and call her family.

"The first issue for us is to make the student safe," Hundley said. "When parents and friends can be involved, it's invaluable to recovery."

Her father came to town for two weeks. Fox and Thomas' NA sponsor volunteered support as well. Thomas likened the help she got from school and friends to the support she gets from Narcotics Anonymous.

Hollins "is a community, just like NA," she said.

Once she found a doctor who adjusted and restarted her prescription, the depression subsided in about two weeks, Hundley said, adding that Thomas' rehab as a teen, and her long abstention, gave her an advantage.

In September, Thomas begins graduate school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, studying anthropology.

"I'm sure it will be nice wherever I am," she said last week. "That's a big thing for me to say."

"There's certainly something to be said for the fact that she has seen lows before in her life," John Thomas said. "She's seen that she can live through those lows and still get on with life and succeed."