Personal Stories

Peer supervision is often silent and stigmatizing instead of including necessary, robust discussions around relapse.

The court found me “not guilty by reason of insanity” and sentenced me to a 30-day evaluation at a psych facility. A crisis had been averted, and my life could return to normal... oh, how far from the truth that idea was.

I wondered how many others have experienced coercion, abuse, and have had their lived experiences of mental illness used as weapons against them by mental health professionals?

I now am more conversant with the latest literature on the medications I take than my prescriber is. While I consider his opinion and clinical judgment, I no longer accept every word as the Gospel truth.

Through journaling, I realized that my lifelong confusion surrounding my memories of traumatic events was the direct result of the psychiatric labels and drugs I swallowed alongside years of parental abuse.

When I sit in Billie’s office, I am still 13 years old, bitter anger saturating my body. I am 23, sobbing that I cannot do this anymore. I am 24, celebrating my first year of college. I am all of these people and none of these people.

The intensity of demand faced in the acute ward is exhausting. No one has a clue what I’m supposed to be doing, least of all me.

I knew by then that there was a thief, but I tried not to rush to conclusions. I couldn’t even think of the possibility that it could be one of the staff. They go into the field in order to help people.

My childhood was stolen by systems focused on labeling and medicating me instead of healing the effects of abuse and neglect.

At the hospital, what traumatized me the most was that my freedom was in the hands of a professional who was steadfast in his conviction that I was feeling things I was not.

We need to come up with a plan that destigmatizes mental health issues for all races, including respectful and non-punitive treatment in in-patient settings.

In the wake of psychiatry, there was a fracture, a gulf that opened between me and the authentic sound of my voice when it is connected and resonates with my truth.

After 34 years, I've concluded that some psychologists/psychiatrists may genuinely want to help people, but they certainly don't have a good toolbox to do it with and, quite likely, never will.

The pandemic lockdown last year afforded me a precious gift of time to explore my creative spirit, and that, in turn, gave me a powerful way to cope.

Missionaries and psychiatrists have failed not through lack of compassion but through lack of willingness to take a long walk and a long, long talk to ask the neighbors what they need and the people what they already know.

My hope and prayer is that this dramatic look at a negative effect of this class of drugs will help you understand that, in my professional assessment, their risks outweigh their benefits.

Maybe I'd be better able to form relationships if I'd had support from people who knew I'd need re-integration services and psychosocial rehabilitation.

I realized that nobody would be able to help me if I didn't help myself. Simply because society wants a cheap, technical solution that will leave me in a state of dependency and frustration for the rest of my life.

If there was ever a time to re-evaluate how society deals with human suffering, it is now. The pandemic’s mental health effects strain every false narrative and misguided practice of psychiatry.

When we have a strong urge to live, it must be very difficult to understand another person’s wish to die. So far, no one has been willing or able to “go there” with me.

The mental health treatment I received between 2016-2019 was like an unreliable car that various mechanics had tinkered with. Yet each time I careened into a ditch, nobody looked at the car, just at me.

I feel my brother was harmed not only by psychiatric drugs, poor nutrition, and dehydration but also by the lack of compassion, social isolation, and dehumanization experience typical of psychiatric facilities.

I wanted to believe TMS could be the thing that helped my depression and changed my life. Instead, I wound up with a new diagnosis: Epilepsy.

The psychiatric patient is interesting—not your average person. She is the one who might tell you: “There is more to this reality, and I saw the proof.”

Rape is to Love what Bombs are to Peace and what Behavioral Eugenics are to Mental Health. So I choose noncompliance with psychiatric force.