State Hospital Memories: More of My Story
The Detroit Free Press did an excellent job in bringing to light the conditions at Pontiac, its loss of accreditation, and closing. Still, they didn't quite grasp the severity of violence there.
Gabapentin Withdrawal: One Year Later
Even though I was only on the medication for a little over six months, I am still traveling down the long road of psychiatric drug withdrawal. This is the hardest thing I have ever endured.
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.
The State Power Triangle and My Spiritual Awakening
My will had been broken by work and psychiatry. How could I get my self-power back after so many years and so many brain-damaging meds?
Waking From the Nightmare: Is Recovery From Akathisia Possible?
I had a chemical brain injury from medications. The only help doctors could offer was more medications: treating the failed treatment with other dangerous treatments.
The Misery of Being Misdiagnosed and Overmedicated
From an early age, relatives and doctors alike had told me I was severely mentally ill. Naturally, I believed them.
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.
One Pill To Disrupt: Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and the Marital Relationship
The suicidality that accompanies akathisia is the natural human impulse to escape being tortured. To save my wife, the woman I love, I was forced to argue for her continued torture.
Disability as a Creative Practice
I wanted to explore how time and sequence work when memory is disrupted, in my case due to traumatic brain injury. I needed to document and reclaim my own sensorium.
25 Years Later: Honoring a Stress Breakdown
This was no illness. And I knew my biochemistry was not the primary issue. I chose to call it a severe stress breakdown.
What’s 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.
Overcoming Social Barriers as a Writer with a Disability
Finally, I realized that my schizophrenia was not a disorder, but a very complex problem that I could solve by myself.
Living Together – With More Resilience and Less Medication
My own experiences have shown that specific exercises can help me to recognize the early symptoms of psychosis even earlier and more subtly, and reduce their intensity — even the delusions!
Hindsight is 20/20
During my 2003 episode I received a series of ten shocks and at first they seemed to “magically” cure me. However, it only took a month for me to go back to feeling depressed and suicidal — again.
I Can Barely Breathe
The psychiatrists broke my body and my brain and now they are washing their hands of me. When I think about what has been done to me and what has been taken from me, I can barely breathe.
The Power of Light and Dark
It is possible to prevent and alleviate both depression and mania by managing the timing and intensity of exposure to light (and dark). I wasn’t sure these measures would work for me, but they did.
From ‘Madness’ to Self-Mastery: Overcoming a Life of Disconnection
You are trained to trust a system, to trust a professional… But I was always following my intuitive self telling me that there was a way out of the madness and the labels.
The Bipolar Rollercoaster: Looking Beyond the Labels
Removing assumptions evoked by my family member’s diagnoses has transformed my understanding of their experience and increased my ability to arrive at solutions applicable to their expressed needs.
What Psychiatry Has Done for Me
The stigma and discrimination I have had to endure due to my ‘diagnosis’ 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.
Still Looking For Answers
What is happening in my body? And has being on medication caused long-term side effects or damage? I’ll forever be searching for answers; I want to feel “normal” again and live a life of enjoyment vs fear and anxiety.
Negatively Charged: ECT and the Truth I Could Never Forget
I live with the changes every day, even now, four years later. It often feels as though the shocks have rendered me one-handed, only ever capable of dealing with one thing at a time.
Inadequately Trained Therapists Pose a Risk to Childhood Trauma Survivors
Mental health professionals must be trained in the dynamics of addiction and abuse if they are to help survivors of childhood trauma.
A Troubled Teen With a Pocket Full of Lithium and Nowhere to Go
Despite the full awareness of Congress and hundreds of deaths in these facilities, little has been done to enact standards in private pay facilities that house troubled teens.
Healing From Transgenerational Trauma: My Mum, My Daughter, & Me
Emotional trauma is the type of wound that, if not processed and integrated, can become a void that expands to swallow not just the traumatized person but also their children and grandchildren.
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.