The Garden of the Mind: Fictions Weeded Out by Psychiatry
Delusions are more than fleeting mental turmoil; they reveal the unconscious mind’s storytelling power.
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.
My Red October – An Army Veteran’s Crucible to Recovery
After my VA mental health team prescribed Prozac, I began experiencing rapidly escalating behavioral changes. The drug was never considered as a potential cause.
I Want Change
Only two hours after we got home, Dan fearlessly told me of the suicide plan that he'd devised while in the hospital. He had all that time to think about it while nobody was listening. He'd lost his dignity, his identity and his place in society. He had lost the will to live.
Called by God: Dealing With Depression and Psychosis
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.
The Hidden Harms Within the Psychedelic Renaissance
If I would have read a story like this before I entered into psychedelic-assisted therapy, I would have been more careful, which might have prevented a lot of unnecessary hurt.
How Big Pharma and the Medical Doctors Killed my Father
When the nurses tried to give him other medications, my father refused. They accused him of being “combative” and “uncooperative,” and they injected him with the highly toxic, incredibly dangerous, mind-bending antipsychotic HALDOL.
Oceans of Energy: What Paranoia Reveals About Interconnection
The psychotic and the mystic swim in the same water. But why do some swim, and some drown?
Drowning in Doubts: Why I Think About Leaving Psychiatry
Going into psychiatry as a naïve 25-year-old, I had no idea what I would discover. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have chosen this field.
Escaping the Hell of Protracted Withdrawal Syndrome
I painfully and gradually learned to function with my dysfunctions. Over time, I noticed genuine improvement.
Treatment Providers Have the Power to Make or Break Recovery
We need treatment providers that listen to their patients and treat them like human beings. Their job is to support our recovery, not stymie it.
Grief and Burnout: The Challenge of Staying Out of Psychiatry
No matter how many times I scatter, I gather my pieces every time and get down to my garden where souls dwell, waiting to be tended.
Recovery from Psychosis in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder Is Possible
The biggest injustice done to a person with such a diagnosis is to give up on them for the rest of their life.
Creativity and COVID: Art-Making During the Pandemic
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.
The Aggressive Suppression of Spiritual Awakening
As they handed her hospital pajamas, similar to the orange prison suits you see on TV, she suddenly understood how little these people could help.
Prepared, Yet Unprepared: My Involuntary Hospitalization Adventure
Overall I learned a great deal during my hospital adventure. The whole experience seemed like a comedy of errors. For me the only people there who were truly out of touch with reality were staff members. All of the patients were very present, albeit in some distress. The reasons for their distress were not unreasonable.
A Patient Reads His Psychiatrist
Dr. W.’s description of me, that I was agitated, insulting, uncooperative, did not match the emotions I was feeling. I felt distraught, hopeless, terrified, and desperate.
Burnout: How Mental Health Systems Fail Neurodivergent Professionals
Many neurodivergent professionals are burning out quietly in a field that prides itself on empathy while treating its providers like machines.
How I Learned to Safely Taper off Psychiatric Drugs, and You Can Too
I made a series of videos with psychologist and researcher Anders Sørensen, answering the questions that haunted me the most throughout my tapering process.
Ambushed by Antidepressant Withdrawal: The Escape Story
I’m alive. More than 30,000 veterans in the past decade alone are not. I was not warned of the risks of this drug. I was not told that once on it, I might never be able to get off it, or the nightmare that would ensue when I tried. I know millions of others were not told either.
Stealing My Mother From Me: The Horrors of Conservatorship
My beloved mother was mistreated, cheated, abused mentally, and alienated from her family by her conservator and the courts.
The Agonizing Nightmare of Drug-Induced Akathisia
Take every horrific feeling you’ve ever had in your life, all at once. Now, times them by 200, right in your gut. That is how akathisia pain feels. When I tell doctors I have drug-induced akathisia, and that it's incredibly painful, they do not believe me. They say my pain is a mental health issue, and they have all methodically undermined my credibility in my permanent record.
Healing From Schizophrenia
My experience is that living in a psychosis forces your brain to "stretch" — you develop extra capacity to handle things. I was pretty much living a normal life, even working some of the time, while having all of my psychotic problems. After the psychoses faded away, I no longer needed to fight monsters, but I still had that extra capacity left. After 11 periods of psychosis, my brain has never worked as well as it does now.
A Psycho-Spiritual Journey
The Wellness approach, despite years of deliberate suppression, has survived and proven itself to be highly effective.
The Observation Room
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.
