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.
Mania or Marijuana?
Is marijuana to blame for my mental health issues? Strange things started happening in my mind once I started using the medical-grade weed.
A Moment to Reflect
Within my heart, something feels like it’s been stolen. But they tell me it’s all in my brain, a tripped-up neurocircuitry, a misguided chemical.
“Don’t Worry, You’ll Be Fine”
I was prescribed a “baby dose” of diazepam for pain management. Over the following months, everything got progressively worse.
Systematic Failure
This is the story of a life in turmoil, my failings and those of the systems meant to help such persons.
Madness to Miracles
I lost 20 years of my life and everyone and everything I held dear, including myself, due to psychiatric medicine. Why did doctors not see how drastically I changed and how rapid and brutal my descent was?
I Had No Idea That Gabapentin Could Do This…
I am now a few months off of Gabapentin, and my withdrawal problems have not passed. I still deal daily with internal tremors throughout my head and back.
Mad Parenting: On Becoming an Unlikely Family Man
I’ve often been told I shouldn’t have kids because I’m “bipolar.” But since my twins’ birth, I’ve been way more stable than I thought I would be, and I’ve found what I’ve always been looking for.
If We Knew What We Know Now
I never questioned the adults around me or wondered if the medications were necessary. Of course they were necessary. A doctor said so.
Trauma Survivors Speak Out Against Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
Despite the majority of the individuals being sent to DBT having histories of severe childhood trauma, little about DBT treatment is “trauma-informed.”
How the Internet Helped Save My Mental Health
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.
The One That Was Away
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.
Nothing At All: How Antidepressants Failed Me
If “nothing at all” sums up my best experience with antidepressants, it also represents the averaged efforts of the psychiatrists who prescribed them.
Psychedelic Therapy Will Not Save Us
For women survivors of sexual or physical trauma, MDMA should be used judiciously. Or maybe it shouldn’t be used at all.
Inside My Suicidal Mind
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.
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.
My Substance Intoxication Was Misdiagnosed as Psychiatric
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 Abused Children to Bipolar Pipeline
The mental health system traumatized me further. They were allies with my abusers to cover up and continue my abuse.
Eugenics, Lobotomy, Risperidone: “Science” Gone Awry
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.
The Song of Psychiatry: The Impact of Language
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.
From Labeled to Healer: A Road Less Traveled
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.
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.
Anesthetized
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.
Connecting the Dots: My Toxic Workplace Made Me “Mentally Ill”
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.
