Meeting Persephone: A Katabasis of Bipolar Night
One doctor advised, “Do not listen to the voices!” Yet I yearned for them—the dreams, the poetic signs, the strange illuminations where the streets shed their names, memories felt like inscriptions from a civilization that never quite existed, and people were shades in an underworld.
My $100,000 Life Sentence
One word turned my entire life upside down and nearly convinced me to end it. What was that one word? Borderline.
The Abyss and Beyond
Psilocybin seemed less interested in helping me avoid the abyss than in showing me that there was an entire landscape beyond it.
What I Learned After Losing My Partner to Polypharmacy
I am left with questions that cannot be resolved retrospectively. Why were medications added without clear longitudinal review of cumulative exposure?
On Dialectics and Disappearance
DBT is made of a soft enough fabric, but you can trace the threads of applied behavioral analysis in its lineage if you know where the seams are, or if you are me and your fingers crash into them without meaning to.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: Psychiatry’s Suppression of the Highly Capable
How many highly capable people are lost to a system that champions mediocrity as a necessary implication of mental illness?
When the Treatment Becomes Part of the Illness
Trusting the psychiatrists, I boarded a ship that would carry me on a decades-long and treacherous journey with psychiatric drugs.
My Mother Had to Be Dying Before Anyone Would Take Her Off the Drugs
On hospice, a psychiatrist finally said yes to deprescribing. Once someone is on hospice, taking medications away becomes the normal thing to do rather than the dangerous thing.
How I Fell Into the Vultures’ Clutches
They said all my suffering was in my imagination. They couldn’t have cared less about my agony—they laughed at me as I begged for mercy.
When Treatment Fails: Why I Relate to Lindsay Clancy
Despite her monstrous act, I can’t shake the feeling that Lindsay may have also suffered at the hands of a broken psychiatric system.
What Happened at the Guidance Center in Flagstaff, AZ
It is my assertion that the Guidance Center acts with impunity in Flagstaff, AZ, and that someone needs to step up and hold them accountable.
OCD and the Anxiety/Gut Connection
I never made the direct connection between my gut and how anxiety created physical problems! Why did not one single medical professional tell me this information?
From Church to Clinic: The Cult of Compliance
It was jarring to realize that the rigid protocols in the church were mirrored in the clinical settings where I began my career.
The Diagnostic Off-Ramp
Once you have been labeled as “Borderline,” anyone who wants to hurt you can use this against you.
Doctors Who Avoid Conversations: How Psychiatry Made Me Ill
Not one of the doctors ever asked how I was feeling or doing. They were never willing to have conversations or sort through problems with me, even though they said I was ill.
The Tragedy of Morton the Sixth
Starting out with what were called “nervous breakdowns,” my father was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and incarcerated in the state mental hospital for the last twenty years of his life.
An Attorney Goes Public—My Experience of Misdiagnosis, Damaging Drugs, and Lack of Informed Consent
Without complete transparency, consent cannot be considered truly informed. While silence may feel safe, it keeps us immobilized.
On Psychological Abuse: How The System Twisted My Pleas For Help
I once heard a fellow survivor describe narcissistic abuse as a “rape of the soul,” and that is exactly how it felt for me.
Surviving Psychiatry’s ‘Help’
I can never visit a zoo again after my experience in the acute ward. I could never watch an animal pace back and forth.
Reconstructing 20+ Years of Psychiatric Treatment Through Medical Records
Seeing it laid out on paper felt like discovering an inventory of damage. It was an astonishing amount of intervention for someone who kept getting worse.
When I Lost the Plot: A PTSD Implosion
I might have been in the grips of insanity, but I wasn’t unaware that something wasn’t right.
Autism and Psychiatry: A Dangerous Mix
I am still trying to recover from all the damage psychiatry did to me and I am seeking therapies that work, with mixed results.
The Bargain
On my chest, I have a tattoo. It's the pagan symbol of Mephistopheles — the mark Faust signed with when he made his deal.
Forty-two Days on a Finnish Psychiatric Ward
I can not say for sure at what point I finally realised that I was a patient in a mental hospital.
Not Serotonin Deficiency: A Veteran’s Story of Misdiagnosis and Medication Harm
When my experience did not match what I had been told to expect, it was minimized and dismissed.
