Desperate Cries for Help and the Copper Toxicity Doctors Missed
Although there is a known correlation between estrogen and copper, mainstream doctors don’t test copper levels or estrogen-dominance.
Initiation or Psychosis? My Descent Into the Underworld
If my nervous system opens wide, if I descend into underworld states, it is not to glorify them. It is to return with language.
Finding Support Outside ‘The System’
How a friend who wasn’t a mental health professional saved me from suicide by supporting me in a way my parents and the professionals hadn’t.
Undoing Thirteen Years of Iatrogenic Illness
No one was ever going to tell me that I was never mentally ill. It would mean that everything The System did to me was a lie.
I Can Barely Breathe: The Journey Continues
I want more for myself than just being a sweet, docile, compliant mental patient. I want a voice and a seat at the table.
This Isn’t the Place: Counselor Education in a Time of Fear
Nervous systems do not calm because a policy is clarified. They calm when impact is honored. When someone stays.
Mourning on Schedule: How Grieving Became a ‘Mental Illness’
My wife died ten months ago. In another two months, I will have a new mental disorder: “Prolonged Grief Disorder.”
When a Radical Feminist from South Korea Became a Psychiatrist in the US
The Western mind fights for justice, while the Eastern soul accepts imperfection. Perhaps when we can hold both, we can flourish.
As a Doctor, I Felt Compelled to Agree to ECT—It Nearly Ruined My Life
Apparently, I signed consent forms, but what was I consenting to? I certainly cannot remember being told about the adverse effects.
What Isn’t Broken, Part 3: Spiritual Rebirth
My suicidality was right about one thing: Something had to die. It just didn’t have to be me.
What Isn’t Broken, Part 2: The Descent
My method had to involve some kind of loophole so that my death wasn’t technically by my own hand. Then it came to me: my eating disorder.
What Isn’t Broken, Part 1: A Temporary Fix
I didn't want a diagnosis to be put on meds, I wanted a diagnosis in order to validate the pain I was in and to be taken seriously by the adults around me.
Patriarchy Leads To Insanity
I am hopeful that for me and others, DSM-driven diagnoses like “bipolar” can be seen as more transient states, as part of a greater journey of the soul.
A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, and a Fight Born from Tragedy
My daughter, London, was only 12 years old when she tragically died from an overdose of pills, shortly after being prescribed an SSRI.
My Escape From the Disabling Power of Disability Benefits
I am now almost completely released from the traditional mental health system, but as a paid peer worker I come back in five days a week to remind those still within the system that there is a way out.
Leaving Psychiatry: Two Weeks In, 10 Years to Exit
With time, my body is healing, and I’m slowly learning how to feel my emotions. I was only hospitalized for two weeks, but it took me over 10 years to exit.
The Sermon on the Balcony at Bùi Viện
Who can even entertain the thought, "Am I the Incipient Buddha?" in a world like this?
All in the Family: My Unlikely Connection To Nick, Rob and Michele Reiner
As a certified paranoid schizophrenic who inadvertently took my own mother’s life while going through my first major psychotic breakdown, I feel a great deal of empathy toward Nick Reiner.
Pills for Everyone: How Psychiatry Failed Me
The irony of antidepressants was that they were supposed to lift me out of depression, but they only dragged me down deeper.
A Story of (Lack of) Self-Determination
Even geriatric patients who have limited cognitive abilities have the right to make their own health care decisions. Why should mental health patients have less?
Faith in Oneself: How Adversity Made Me Anti-fragile
Post-traumatic growth doesn’t look like Superwoman. It’s simply the strength to endure.
I Declared Myself Jesus and Still Avoided the Psych Ward
I might still get a psychosis, but it was short-lived and I am not feeling down, or overdosed by psychiatric drugs.
Living Protracted
Protracted withdrawal has taken so much from so many of us—years of our lives, our identities, our relationships, and the chance to simply feel safe in our own bodies and minds.
Where the Bullet Stayed
Writing became the space between pain and acceptance, the only place where both could coexist without one needing to kill the other.
Psychiatrists Do Not Apologize
From the ages of 16 to 20, I was tortured by American psychiatrists who suffered under the delusion that homosexuality was a mental illness.
