Personal Stories

I never questioned the adults around me or wondered if the medications were necessary. Of course they were necessary. A doctor said so.

Despite the majority of the individuals being sent to DBT having histories of severe childhood trauma, little about DBT treatment is “trauma-informed.”

My experience has shown me that if you have enough pain in your life, you will look anywhere for the truth, even if this truth goes against what the medical system is telling you.

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.

If “nothing at all” sums up my best experience with antidepressants, it also represents the averaged efforts of the psychiatrists who prescribed them.

For women survivors of sexual or physical trauma, MDMA should be used judiciously. Or maybe it shouldn’t be used at all.

I need somebody who will push through that thick cotton wool ball with me until that moment when we can toss it away altogether. Someone who really tries to look at this world through the lens of my life, not theirs.

It will take me over three years to remove all this medication from my body, and countless months to recover from the harmful effects these drugs had on my mind.

God supported me during my psychosis. I was afraid that I would lose God when I took antipsychotics again. That had happened after my first forced medication.

I thought it’d be a good idea to just triple the daily dose of St. John’s wort — surely a plant-based, prescription-free pill couldn’t be dangerous? I was wrong.

The mental health system traumatized me further. They were allies with my abusers to cover up and continue my abuse.

The worst thing about psychiatry is how it convinces your family to do things that they think are correct, which ultimately gets them to participate in harming you.

I want to share the journey I took to find a new language, a new story, around my experiences and how that journey impacted my survival.

We have let down our children (and ourselves) by losing touch with parental intuition and handing their care over to professionals at the first sign of a problem.

Class war between the haves and have nots is nowhere more evident than in a psychiatric ward. Dissidence becomes both a disease and a crime where cure is indistinguishable from punishment.

At times I dream about meeting those doctors, and telling them how wrong they were when they told me I would always be a very sick person, needing medication my whole life.

In 1996, I suffered my first manic episode. My mother was convinced it had been caused by chemical exposure. But I wouldn’t hear it, and neither would my psychiatrists.

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 experience of raising a son who was bright and creative but didn’t fit the mold helped me to approach my restless, impulsive students more compassionately and creatively.

Ketamine treatment, which was being hailed as a ‘miracle cure’, backfired so spectacularly that it very nearly cost me my life.

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

There is no replacing the near 30 years that psychiatry took from me and my family. I am now 70 years old and in failing health which I attribute to those damn drugs.

Dr. Jones spoke to me in a way no doctor ever had. His affect, his demeanor, his presence, lit an ember in the darkness within my soul.

I didn’t know that I had never fully experienced my emotional pain until I was thrown into an altered state. With “psychosis” I plowed through layers and layers of pain, alone in the night.

My doctor estimates that I have less than a year to live. I do not want my life to end as it began, with trauma, pain and dehumanization. I would like dignity and compassion in my final days.