Personal Stories

People with “lived experience” tell of their interactions with psychiatry and how it impacted their lives, and of their own paths to recovery.

Only When It Poured

7
Disposable toothbrushes and sporks. Crayons instead of pens. Little pills in little paper cups. Someone would come. Someone would go. The days turned into nights and back again.

One Pill To Disrupt: Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and the Marital Relationship

13
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.

Connecting the Dots: My Toxic Workplace Made Me “Mentally Ill”

20
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.

The Bipolar Rollercoaster: Looking Beyond the Labels

15
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.
crime scene school shooters

Calm, Organized, Homicidal Behaviour – My Connection to School Shooters

32
There is little doubt in my mind that many school shooters were in an antidepressant-induced state of psychosis, which is a loss of contact with reality that makes it difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is not real. That's what happened to me. I started taking 60mg of Paxil a day. Three days later, I planned my suicide. Then I planned a murder.
involuntary commitment

What It’s Like to Be Involuntarily Committed

40
Ten years after being fired for taking a mental health leave after the Virginia Tech massacre, I was diagnosed as "schizophrenic" and involuntarily committed to a hospital. Now I have a job and a life, but I'm still forced to take drugs and report to a social worker.

From ‘Madness’ to Self-Mastery: Overcoming a Life of Disconnection

8
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.
Photograph of a blue plate shattering

When Treatment Makes You Sick: The Eating Disorder Clinic

6
Eight years after beginning ‘treatment’ for an ‘eating disorder’, I was eating worse than ever. Yet three years after quitting that ‘treatment’, food is a pleasure, not a problem.

Surviving the Bipolar Label

25
The label bipolar validated that I was suffering, yes, but it was also a bargain that asked me to see my suffering as unreasonable, the result of a deformity within my body.

My Beautiful Psychosis: A Soul Process

8
To say a person is out of touch with reality is to ignore the validity of the reality that they are in touch with. This is not only disempowering, but also fails to celebrate the journey that the person is on.
criminal psychiatry

People Don’t Recover So Spectacularly from Criminal Psychiatry

75
Psychiatry and Catholicism have too much in common, both founded by men, upon questionable source materials. I knew I was in danger, not being helped.

Inadequately Trained Therapists Pose a Risk to Childhood Trauma Survivors

11
Mental health professionals must be trained in the dynamics of addiction and abuse if they are to help survivors of childhood trauma.

“Dad, You Were Right”: I Got Better When I Stopped Treatment

123
Through all the years that I was a mental patient, my parents were excellent advocates who constantly questioned what the docs were doing, even though my own faith in psychiatry was unwavering.... Amazingly, what cured me was not some type of “treatment,” but getting away from drugs and therapy.

Validating Psychosis: The Missing Narrative  

30
I am here today because I didn't take the psychotropic medication I was prescribed. Because I didn't accept someone else's narrative about MY story. Because I listened to my voices. Because I let them guide me— into the underworld, and back.

My Substance Intoxication Was Misdiagnosed as Psychiatric

10
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 Worst Thing: How My Mother’s Death Pushed Me to Overcome OCD

5
The goal of creating a legacy for my mother required that I go beyond managing my symptoms to confronting my OCD at its roots. I had to fundamentally change my understanding of anxiety.
overmedication postpartum depression

The Answers in the Attic: A Mother-Daughter Story of Overmedication and Recovery

38
In 1959, my mother suffered what people referred to as a nervous breakdown after my sister’s birth. I puzzled over why Mom never recovered, until I found Dad’s collection of medical records in my sister’s attic. How could anyone give a nursing mother with three small children so many drugs in such a short period of time?

Assault and Exploitation: My Peer Worker Experience

31
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.
student counseling

Student Counseling Services: Do They Really Help the ‘Mentally Ill’?

40
I used to think that the counseling center would help me to resolve my inner conflicts. That visiting the center would do some good for me. I have since realized that most mainstream “mental health” is more damaging than helpful. These days if student counselors see any problem with a student visiting the center, they send him or her to see a psychiatrist.
iatrogenic harm symptoms

For the Record

22
Here and now, I am Ativan-free and slowly tapering off Wellbutrin after 25+ years. Unable to work due to the severity of iatrogenic injury, I sometimes think of myself as a healing journeywoman. When the terrain is especially rough, I reflect on the words: "The best revenge is living a happy, healthy life." When circumstances and symptoms permit, I’m doing just that.
drowning in antidepressants

Ambushed by Antidepressants for 30 Years

93
They helped me function for a while, but the debilitating side effects of antidepressants held me prisoner. I'm still having a hard time understanding how this could have happened. It's been suggested to me by a therapist that what I'm going through now is another kind of PTSD: the ongoing trauma of realizing what antidepressants did to me for 30 years.

Extended Leave

29
Without doubt, Extended Leave profoundly curtails one's freedoms and rights, and the threshold for what is deemed “unacceptable” behaviour is invariably lowered. My only crime was being offensive towards an ACT team member. It seems that the goal I am now reduced to fighting for is merely the right to be rude in my own home.
snapshots of spring

Snapshots of Spring: Journeying Off Psych Meds After 20 Years of Compliance

86
My prayer to be taken out of my misery was answered, just not the way I used to envision. I managed to escape the system and here I am in the same lifetime, alive and well. I’m slowly getting acquainted with this new setup and am eternally grateful for yet another opportunity at life, which I hope does not slip through my fingers.
mental health transformation

A Secret No Longer

19
My psychiatrist/therapist was able to give me a true understanding into what addiction and psychosis really are and how they can be treated with little or no medication. I still struggle, but I have been able to manage my symptoms with the help of ACT therapy, exercise, "forest bathing," storytelling, music and art. I am now able to feel a sense of peaceful fulfillment, and that is all anyone can really ask for.
moral compass

WARNING: May Cause Moral Failure

16
As the SNRI molecules sluggishly evacuated my bloodstream and I progressively regained my emotions, the gravity of what I had done descended upon me. I couldn’t believe I had actually been capable of committing several crimes over an extended period of time, without stopping to think about the risks to my wife and kids, or even myself.