Tag: poetry and mental health

This gnawing burning squiggle of an emotion that streams through insipidness; speaks in the space where my gut meets the churning locket of despair. Alone,...

I claw and climb into your head, Controlling your thoughts until I am fed. With a drink or a drug, I will be seized. With a drink...

It’s just a little pill that they say will fix your nerves; An antipsychotic - which will normalize your aim. “We need you to fit in and we need...

It's hard, if not impossible, to impose on my son’s story any kind of literary “sense.” As a writer and a mother both, this has been my challenge. 

Author Deborah Kasdan discusses her memoir of her late sister, "Roll Back The World."

It takes a long time to recover from a psychotic episode, I understand now, and I wish someone had found a way, especially during those early years of her troubles, to give Rachel more space and time to find her own path to health.

Missionaries and psychiatrists have failed not through lack of compassion but through lack of willingness to take a long walk and a long, long talk to ask the neighbors what they need and the people what they already know.

Jyl Ion hears voices, but she refuses to view these non-ordinary experiences as a sign of mental illness. Instead Jyl came off 16 years of multiple toxic medications, talks to her ancestor spirits and has reclaimed access to unsanctioned knowledge.

In this piece for The Paris Review, Belinda McKeon analyzes the poetry and letters Sylvia Plath wrote in the few months just before her suicide.

Ronald Pies, MD, is one of American's most eminent and prestigious psychiatrists.  He is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times, and he is a Professor of Psychiatry at both Syracuse and Tufts. I disagree with many of Dr. Pies' contentions, and I have expressed these disagreements in detail in various posts. But there is one area where I have to acknowledge Dr. Pies' efforts:  he never gives up in his defense of his beloved psychiatry, even in the face of the most damaging counter-evidence. For instance, on more than one occasion, he has asserted, with apparent sincerity and conviction, that psychiatry never promoted the chemical imbalance theory of depression!