Personal Stories

I feel my brother was harmed not only by psychiatric drugs, poor nutrition, and dehydration but also by the lack of compassion, social isolation, and dehumanization experience typical of psychiatric facilities.

I believe there's no harm in giving meds a try—it worked for me. Just be aware that they can only do so much. The rest of the journey requires some navigation and self-direction.

I had read about such places in The Bell Jar, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For more than a year, this place was my home.

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was just nineteen. I am forty-three now, and I have recovered – and I use the term...

The pandemic lockdown last year afforded me a precious gift of time to explore my creative spirit, and that, in turn, gave me a powerful way to cope.

Recovery is adapting to how your brain works. You accept how it works, observing what makes it worse or better, and learn to navigate the triggers and symptoms you experience. As you do things differently, these 'corrective experiences' begin to undo the negative beliefs you have internalized.

This was no illness. And I knew my biochemistry was not the primary issue. I chose to call it a severe stress breakdown.

Imagine my excitement, the hope that relief from the sucking tar of misery that dogged too many of my days was within my reach. From that moment and for thirty years to follow, I was the willing guinea pig for any number of drugs. Nothing helped for long.

During my 2003 episode I received a series of ten shocks and at first they seemed to “magically” cure me. However, it only took a month for me to go back to feeling depressed and suicidal — again.

Within my heart, something feels like it’s been stolen. But they tell me it’s all in my brain, a tripped-up neurocircuitry, a misguided chemical.

It feels challenging to commit to a lifetime process of self-reflection and self-improvement when someone is offering you an easy way out.

My will had been broken by work and psychiatry. How could I get my self-power back after so many years and so many brain-damaging meds?

A conflict in my personal life made it possible for me to imagine the power of emotional trauma to trigger a mental health disorder—and gave me new insights about what can help heal it.

I slowly recognized that I wanted to fight every single person who used language based on their learned beliefs about “mental illness.” They didn’t know any better—so why did I feel so angry?

I was shaking and crying as I told a stranger everything about my life, and they looked at me like I was a criminal. Like I was crazy. I started to think maybe I was.

Even though my 'psychoses’ have been beautiful, you also need a safe place to be able to process them.

Inside the hospital, I was a social butterfly and knew practically everyone on my wing, but at home, I was a nobody and a loner. If only I had the energy to fake it one hundred percent of the time, then nobody would suspect a thing.

During my 96-hour hold in the psych unit—despite that I was rational and a danger to no one—I was made to feel ashamed and somehow unclean. I went home feeling more depressed than ever.

Although I saw a number of counselors and therapists for my dependency issues, they were unable to help me. Therapists saw my unhappy childhood experiences as part of me, part of who I was, but I did not see it that way. I imagined the experiences circling around outside of ‘the real me’ like moons around a planet, standing between me and the outside world.

I see it everywhere: People with mental illness need medication.  It sounds reasonable. Today, there are even political organizations that seek to make it easy to force a person to take it.

It is through the experience of suffering that God educates us with the knowledge of the heart that He alone holds the key to.

If the sum of my experience exists only as fractured memories that never happened, who am I? It has led me to a near-constant questioning of every aspect in my life.

A mad priestess kicks shame and stigma in the teeth, knowing that we can do better. We could be leading the charge for healing—please don’t call it “mental illness” anymore—and take our place as the wounded healers.

It's really hard to talk about suicide. We are constantly constrained by the notion that our mental health is our individual responsibility to manage, told to “live our best lives” by a never-ending campaign of exploitative wellness fads. A more collective conversation is needed.

We need treatment providers that listen to their patients and treat them like human beings. Their job is to support our recovery, not stymie it.