Take a Flyer Off a Wall: Six Hours in the Hole
Once your body enters a police car or an ambulance, it doesnât matter what labels you carry or what the apparent âsymptomsâ are. It doesnât matter if you even have any label at all. The moment you acquire a mental illness is when someone who doesnât like you decides that you have one.
âYou Are Completely Screwedâ â A Firsthand Experience with Psychoeducation
Around me in the room I could see the different faces lit up by the big whiteboard raised above us. âThere are these symptoms...â The psychiatrist would talk for long periods of time, while the nurses would sit quiet, nodding. I became skeptical and thought: âYou are trying to talk me into something.â
Why I Fight for Trauma-Informed Systems
I am not sure what was worse: being abused growing up while my community documentedâthen ignoredâmy torment, or being attacked for going public with my story.
Awakening: Shedding the “Mentally Ill” Identity and Reclaiming My Life
If I had not crumbled, brought to my knees beneath the weight of the misdiagnoses and sordid side-effects of the medications, I would not have had the opportunity to rise up and gain such a strong sense of selfâsomething for which many spend their whole life searching.
From Stoned to “Schizophrenic”: My Mental Healthcare Journey
During a period of self-doubt, I chose to see a psychiatrist because I was engulfed in negative thoughts and couldn't find a direction in life. The slightest joys came only when I was high. Though my weed addiction was likely causing all of my symptoms, my psychiatristâs response was to prescribe antipsychotics.
The Abused Children to Bipolar Pipeline
The mental health system traumatized me further. They were allies with my abusers to cover up and continue my abuse.
Psychiatry Almost Drove Me Crazy
I am a survivor of severe psychiatric abuse. There was a year or so in the early 1980âs when I was in and out...
Not Just Another Stain on the Wall
During my 96-hour hold in the psych unitâdespite that I was rational and a danger to no oneâI was made to feel ashamed and somehow unclean. I went home feeling more depressed than ever.
Validating Psychosis: The Missing Narrative Â
I am here today because I didn't take the psychotropic medication I was prescribed. Because I didn't accept someone else's narrative about MY story. Because I listened to my voices. Because I let them guide meâ into the underworld, and back.
Dan’s Journey Through OCD
Editor's Note: To protect the anonymity of her son, this author has published under a pseudonym.
With the help of the Internet, my seventeen-year-old son...
Fatherland Dreamland Motherland Hinterland
I grew up in Rhodesia, a British colony in southern Africa. Until the age of 16, I lived on the grounds of Ingutsheni Mental Hospital where my father worked. As a psychiatrist, he had enormous power.
On Making Non Sense
I have lost interest in making sense. Insofar as anti-stigma entails a reassertion of my apparently forgotten humanity via the retelling of some personal narrative in which I generalize my unique experiences toward some universal wisdom, I have lost interest in the reduction of stigma. I would much prefer it if you didnât need me to be comprehensible.
The Cost of Being Psychotic in America
People living with psychosisâpeople like meâare dying because we are being discriminated against by people whoâd rather see us hurt than attempt to work with us and give us the decency and respect that should be accorded us as a human right. And nobody deserves to be assaulted or shot after theyâve reached out for help.
The Manifesto of a Noncompliant Mental Patient
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.
Passage
When I was twenty-eight, I had what is commonly referred to as a âpsychotic break.â It was nothing like what I wouldâve imagined, given the cultural stereotypes. It was not in the least nonsensical. There was an exacting inner logic and meaning. Twenty-two years later, I continue to believe in the harrowing greatness of what my younger self went through.
43 and Finding Wellness: Attending to the 4 Bodies
My personal and professional experiences have taught me that the only way to address mental health is holistically. If you are struggling with anxiety or depression, I believe it is necessary to attend to all of your bodiesâphysical, mental, emotional and spiritualâin order to achieve wellness.
What Happens When There Is No Help?
My family and my rapists, abusers and psychiatrists all had it in common that they wanted me to âtake somethingâ to become more obedient and quiet.
Isolated by the Coronavirus? Welcome to My World
There is such shame and social punishment around experiencing extreme states of mind and being given a psychiatric label that is itself profoundly isolating. This is a kind of isolation that people who are merely practicing social distancing will probably never know.
Dear Psychiatry
Dear Psychiatry: We are done with your juvenile black-and-white bullying tactics that argue that because you cannot neatly contain Us in a box of your design that We are somehow the problem.
So Long, Pill Mill: A Letter to My Former Patients and Their Families
I love being a psych nurse practitioner, and I never want to feel that my only role is pushing pills. The private practice I started is my effort to move away from this dysfunctional system.
A System Built on Fear
Experiences such as pain, turmoil, trauma and grief arenât separate from the personâthey shape how that person sees the world, how they cope with the world. To separate those experiences from the person, to call them sick, feels barbaric. It feels as if humans are being taught to fear being human.
Coercion in Care
To this day I do not know how I found my way back. I think it mightâve had something to do with willpower, as I was NOT going to lose myself. I was NOT going to end up like those people who were living indefinitely in the hospitalâthose âchronic schizophrenicsâ, as they say. I was going to find my way back, back to myself.
Eternal Sorrow: My Unexpected Descent into the Mental Health System
In searching for answers as to what went wrong with my treatment, my family and I discovered that there is already much scientific evidence demonstrating the dangers of antipsychotic medications and why they should not be used to treat illnesses such as Tourette Syndrome.
Becoming the Trauma-Informed Trainer I Needed
It was my experience, which I later found was supported by research, that exercise had the power to help me heal, but it also had the potential to exacerbate my trauma symptoms.
The Connection Between ‘Bipolar Disorder’ and Migraine: Unraveling the History of a Family Line
Why did I have to go on a personal investigation to finally figure out that I was having migraines?
