Made “Mad” in America
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.
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.
Suicidality: When Your Feelings Are Too Dangerous
After finding a cop at my door, I learned it wasnât safe to talk about my feelings of wanting to die. As a result, I spent the better part of the next decade not telling anyone when I was suicidal.
What Makes People Hear Voices?
Researchers treat voicehearing as the sign of a disease or a disorder or a dysfunction of the brain. That it might be something moreâa relationship of some kind with God that developed in this way as part of our evolution over eonsâdoes not seem to have occurred to anyone who has worked in the field of psychology.
The Failure to Acknowledge Suicidality
I feel like I have been failed by the healthcare system over and over again. I expected to be able to rely on therapists, psychologists, and doctors to properly evaluate, diagnosis, and treat me⌠especially when chronic suicidality is in the picture. Instead, I have a lengthy list of ways I have been failed. These failures have often added to my hopelessness.
My Time at Bellevue
I've never been so proud of such a display of civil disobedience. These heretofore robots, pumped with power sedatives, still possessed human emotions and had, overnight, found a voice to express their discontent. The riots would continue for several more nights and the ward became a chaotic jungle.
A Patient Reads His Psychiatrist
Dr. W.âs description of me, that I was agitated, insulting, uncooperative, did not match the emotions I was feeling. I felt distraught, hopeless, terrified, and desperate.
Lithium Toxicity and an Almost-Human Hospital
Lithium is a notoriously toxic substance, and if it isnât managed carefully enough, can have some very nasty effects. I discovered this the hard way. It got to the point where I could barely eat or drink or walk around. Yet lithium never made a dent â not for a single moment â in what was going on in my head.
My Fight Against Antidepressants, Part III: Breaking Free
I had managed to get off the drugs again, this time with practically no withdrawal reactions other than some disturbances to my sleep which eventually settled down. I truly feel that I have been given a second chance because I am aware of how many people struggle terribly with these drugs just as I did.
Subtle Ways Psychiatry Has Harmed Us
Weâre not dysfunctional or bad just because there are two of us in here. Whatâs more important than being a socially acceptable single person is that we know how to get along and manage our trauma and our life together. We just need to be accepted as we are.
So Long, Pill Mill: A Letter to My Former Patients and Their Families
I love being a psych nurse practitioner, and I never want to feel that my only role is pushing pills. The private practice I started is my effort to move away from this dysfunctional system.
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?
Committed at 16: Memories of a State Hospital
While most of the sting is gone, even now â almost sixty years on â I canât get through a single day without thinking about shock treatment and the state hospital. I regularly have dreams or nightmares about being lost in a strange place and someone making me feel like dirt.
Giving Up on Mental Health Care
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.
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.
Awakening: Shedding the “Mentally Ill” Identity and Reclaiming My Life
If I had not crumbled, brought to my knees beneath the weight of the misdiagnoses and sordid side-effects of the medications, I would not have had the opportunity to rise up and gain such a strong sense of selfâsomething for which many spend their whole life searching.
The Suicide Police: Harm Disguised As Help
Itâs easy to tell a dead person they mattered. Humans are great at writing eulogies. But we are shit at making people feel like they matter while they are alive.
When the Hospital is Sick
At my job as an inpatient mental health counselor, I had to confront the reality of a hospitalization system with serious and devastating flaws. I felt immensely powerless and understood how my coworkers could end up so negligent, numb, and at times abusive. And I understood how patients could become violent or self-injurious after years in these dismal hospitals.
Ten Hospitalizations in Three Years
When the psychiatrist prescribed me Zoloft, he did not warn me that it could cause a manic episode. So my second hospitalization was a disaster. A mental hospital is like a deranged dystopian high school. The upstairs was chaotic, dangerous, and violent. Sometimes people were yelling and throwing things. But these werenât the most harmful moments.
Breaking with Disorder: The Invisible Flames of Mental Illness Labels
These labels left me docile to a broken mental health systemâa carceral system that viewed me interchangeably as a patient or an object, but never a person.
Lucky to Be Alive: The Suicide Attempt I Don’t Remember
Imagine for a moment that you had a sleepwalking episode in which you tried to commit suicide. When you awaken you are in a hospital bed, having no idea where or even who you are nor how you got there. Then someone who loves you tells you that you tried to take your own life.Â
What Does it Mean to be Anti-Psychiatry? Thoughts of a Cartoon Anteater
How did I get here? What turned me from loyal acolyte into fearsome-clawed rebel, itching to take on the high priests of psychiatry? Well, there is nothing like being given a taste of psychiatryâs vile medicine for igniting the revolutionary furnace and getting it glowing white hot.
My Letter to an Advocate for Involuntary Treatment
How long would I have to be off meds and stay safe and out of the hospital before my story would mean something to you and the advocates for chemical interventions?
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.
The Best Medicine
Today I am not only medication-free but also thriving. While many people in my life are delighted by my transformation, most did not think it possible. How did I transition from being a chronic, "seriously mentally ill" psychiatric patient to a vibrant being?