Personal Stories

People with “lived experience” tell of their interactions with psychiatry and how it impacted their lives, and of their own paths to recovery.

Reconstruction: A Recovery Narrative

25
When I read recovery stories, I am sometimes challenged by the prospect of thinking about my life in linear terms, "Here are the years...

Surviving Schizophrenia: A Memoir

45
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 Manifesto of a Noncompliant Mental Patient

19
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.

A Psychiatrist Remembers His Recovery from Schizophrenia

5
A psychiatrist since 1949, I was psychiatrically hospitalized on December 21, 1963 at New York City's Mt. Sinai Hospital.   I stayed for three months,...

From the Loony Bin To Stand-Up Comedy

0
I was sixteen and going on seventeen and I had never gone crazy before.  I think the most startling aspect of it is how...