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.

Madness to Miracles

39
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

22
While most of the sting is gone, even now — almost sixty years on — I can’t 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.

Breaking with Disorder: The Invisible Flames of Mental Illness Labels

44
These labels left me docile to a broken mental health system—a carceral system that viewed me interchangeably as a patient or an object, but never a person.
An illustration depicting headphones and the words "Song of Psychiatry"

The Song of Psychiatry: The Impact of Language

12
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.
suicidality

The Failure to Acknowledge Suicidality

19
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.

Subtle Ways Psychiatry Has Harmed Us

27
We’re not dysfunctional or bad just because there are two of us in here. What’s 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.
hospital is sick

When the Hospital is Sick

137
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.
abused child

The Abused Children to Bipolar Pipeline

33
The mental health system traumatized me further. They were allies with my abusers to cover up and continue my abuse.

Awakening: Shedding the “Mentally Ill” Identity and Reclaiming My Life

14
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 self—something for which many spend their whole life searching.
mdma

Psychedelic Therapy Will Not Save Us

23
For women survivors of sexual or physical trauma, MDMA should be used judiciously. Or maybe it shouldn’t be used at all.
suicidal mind

Inside My Suicidal Mind

40
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.
mental hospital

Ten Hospitalizations in Three Years

369
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 weren’t the most harmful moments.

The Misery of Being Misdiagnosed and Overmedicated

8
From an early age, relatives and doctors alike had told me I was severely mentally ill. Naturally, I believed them.

What Does it Mean to be Anti-Psychiatry? Thoughts of a Cartoon Anteater

44
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 psychiatry’s vile medicine for igniting the revolutionary furnace and getting it glowing white hot.

On Being Forced Out in the Clinical Psychology Field

39
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?

Informed Consent for Benzodiazepines: A Personal Account

21
I began to have transient moments where I would feel oddly disconnected from my environment or wake up and feel like I was coming out of my skin. I did not know it at the time, but I was experiencing interdose benzodiazepine withdrawal and it would end up leading me down a path of polypharmacy.
university of chicago

Informed Consent, or Lack Thereof in My Psychiatric Experience

63
After telling my psychotherapist about my medication-fueled suicidal ideation, he said, “You have two options. We can do this either voluntarily or involuntarily.” Aghast and shaken, but assuming everyone in the medical system had my best interests at heart, I reluctantly agreed to go to the hospital without any protest.

Childhood Gaslighting: When Difference Receives a Diagnosis

10
Aside from the home, school is typically where we learn our worth or lack of it. We learn what we are taught, and how we are taught is often what we are taught.

My Partner Abused Me. I Was the One Locked Up

15
Every day, psychiatrists in Australia’s mental health system write reports denying the sanity of women who are victims of sexual assault, rape, or domestic violence. I know: I was one of them.

The Best Medicine

22
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?
reversing diagnosis

Reversing My Diagnosis

15
I was fine until traumatic events collided and pushed me to a state of emotional crisis. Yet I emerged this time as a different person, and knew I had to exit the mainstream mental health system.

“Don’t Worry, You’ll Be Fine”

14
I was prescribed a “baby dose” of diazepam for pain management. Over the following months, everything got progressively worse.

The Undervalued Potential of Living Without Psychiatric Drugs

23
Compared to the last six years, compared to how intense the drugs are and how grueling the side-effects, my first psychosis at 17, I admit, was honestly not that bad.
ECT

Negatively Charged: ECT and the Truth I Could Never Forget

17
I live with the changes every day, even now, four years later. It often feels as though the shocks have rendered me one-handed, only ever capable of dealing with one thing at a time.
ACT Assertive Community Treatment

Reflections on a Decade of Assertive Community Treatment

25
Sometimes I am crazy and sometimes I need help, but that help must not be forced upon me. I need to direct my own care; I need to be listened to. ACT is a method of social control that has more to do with saving money than assisting those in need. Money is saved by turning patients' homes into hospitals.