The “Shotgun Method” â A Story of Mental Health Crisis in Iceland
"Let's try the shotgun method," my psychiatrist said â meaning that you load the gun with a bunch of pellets and hope that one of them hits the target. I went through 16 different psychiatric medications in five years, and they were not the right choice for me.
The Outing of a Consumer
The problem with being a consumer is that we get consumed. Iâve been the bacon at far too many mental health picnics. Someoneâs salary gets paid, someoneâs program gets funded, someoneâs career gets enhanced, someone gets accolades for being so altruistic and such a great savior â and me, what do I get? Exposed, laid bare, and isolated.
Memories of a Childhood in a Mental Hospital
My stay at the hospital had no impact on the problem that led to my admission. But it did exacerbate other problems and change me in fundamental ways. I am a deformed product of that âcutting-edge facilityâ and the âtreatmentsâ I received there â social isolation, pills and shots, ice bath and ECT.
Psychic Gardening and Walking the Sensitive Path
I learned that trying to fight, ignore, push away what I was dealing with was not working. I had to face it, accept it, work out what it had come to teach me and then work out how to set it free.
What Itâs Like to Be Involuntarily Committed
Ten years after being fired for taking a mental health leave after the Virginia Tech massacre, I was diagnosed as "schizophrenic" and involuntarily committed to a hospital. Now I have a job and a life, but I'm still forced to take drugs and report to a social worker.
Enjoying the Road Less Traveled
The people that my son and I continued to consult with over the years didn't talk of mental illness as a brain disease, a chemical imbalance, or a problem with one's genes. Depending on the therapy, they spoke in terms of restoring life force energy, changing cellular vibration, learning to listen and understand, and building a self.
The Monster in Our House: What Psychiatric Medication Did to My Father
When we eliminated his last psychotropic prescription, it was as if my father came back from the dead. All of the monster-like qualities that we thought were severe symptoms of his dementia have practically disappeared. Weâve found ourselves questioning whether he has dementia at all.
Creatively Managing Voice-Hearing Through Spiritual Writing
I am a psychiatric survivor of over thirty-six years. Since my nervous breakdown in 1978, I have undergone multitudinous experiences ranging from the subtly humiliating to the horrifically debilitating at the hands of incompetent psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists who, in the name of medicine, did more harm than good.
My Pharmaceutical Reincarnation
I lost almost four years of my life, and Iâve not a doubt that it was due to those âlife-savingâ pills. To that end, they did work. At a time when I was doubled-over with depression, those four prescriptions kept me alive. But then they killed me slowly and brought me back as a stranger.
My Letter to an Advocate for Involuntary Treatment
How long would I have to be off meds and stay safe and out of the hospital before my story would mean something to you and the advocates for chemical interventions?
The Note
Iâve helped dozens of my students through tough times and suicidal thoughts. But my own child? How do I handle THIS?
A Clinical Social Workerâs Bane
We have all become assembly line workers in the factory of mental health. At the facility, I put in at least 50 hours and live with a constant dread of not having clicked a button, of not having made another phone call, of overlooking the sadness in someoneâs eyes. The risk of burnout or empathy fatigue is high, yet the machine hums along.
My Polypharmacy Predicament
Ironically, my post-traumatic stress disorder no longer stems from the events that led to my hospitalizations, but from the maltreatment I received within the hospitals. Now, every time I take my medication late or miss a dose, I feel the unsettling presence of dissociation creeping in, the terrifying panic of losing my mental bearings and being rehospitalized.Â
The Light in the Dark
Darkness began to consume my life, both literally and metaphorically. My surroundings and even my own thoughts would become distorted into something terrifying. As the nights droned on, shadows in my dorm room would contort themselves into threatening figures. The whispers continued to grow, overcoming the thoughts in my head.
Informed Consent for Benzodiazepines: A Personal Account
I began to have transient moments where I would feel oddly disconnected from my environment or wake up and feel like I was coming out of my skin. I did not know it at the time, but I was experiencing interdose benzodiazepine withdrawal and it would end up leading me down a path of polypharmacy.
Whatâs Missing from NAMI and Pro-Psychiatry: Lived Experience
Since many psych patients become forced consumers, their advocates have a duty to be educated and concerned with adverse reactions.
Mood Tracking: My System for Reducing Psychiatric Hospitalizations
Mood tracking can make someone realize: Iâm starting to become manic, and this is why, and this is what I can do about it.
What I Learned as a Moderator for an Antidepressant Taper Support Group
Medication support groups are saving lives and brains because doctors do not know how to safely taper off psych meds.
Against the Odds: âUnimproved Schizophrenicâ to Yale PhD
Forty years after I had first been admitted to the hospital, I was ready to confront my past. So, I sent for my hospital records, and I read them. As an experienced clinician, I recognized immediately what the doctors hadnât been able to see in 1960: my problem wasnât âschizophreniaâ but PTSD, connected with incest.
What Psychiatry Has Done for Me
The stigma and discrimination I have had to endure due to my âdiagnosisâ crushed my spirit and the dreams I had for my life. But the most devastating part of all is how it altered my relationship with my two sons.
Human
God-like, they assured me they knew what was wrong with me and had the elixir. But their elixir was a poison.
Abused by Psychiatrists After a BPD Misdiagnosis
If you don't realize that you are autistic, your intellectual, sensory, social, and emotional differences are a mystery, even to you.
Truth-Telling and Consequences
Itâs at that point of asking for help from someone in authority, someone we should be able to trust, that many have their story stolen from them.
Out of the Abyss (with a Little Help from My Friends)
An ER doctor told me I was experiencing venlafaxine withdrawal, then told me to go home and take care of myself. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to enter pure hell.
The Prescription that Changed My Life
What I have learned is that benzos donât discriminate. They donât care that you have a masterâs degree or that you are a good person in the community or that you were just doing what the doctors told you to do and you were woefully ignorant and misinformed of their dangers.
