Tag: psychiatric diagnosis
Chapter Twenty-Six: Reaching the End, and Making a Start
A deep blue blanketing of 1AM sky envelops my car as I sit in my parents’ driveway in February 2010, pondering my next, last...
Chapter Twenty-Five: “Paranoid Android”
It is Christmas Eve of 2008. I am leaning against the kitchen counter of an old friend’s house, arms tucked tightly across my stomach,...
Chapter Twenty-Four: Off the Meds and Out of My Mind
During my first few days on the locked psychiatric unit of the hospital on the hill in early December 2008, I counted the passing...
Chapter Twenty-Three: On the Locked Unit, Locked in Myself
As we made our way out of Boston and to the psychiatric hospital on the hill, I watched the ‘normal’ world— the world beyond the Plexiglas rear window of the ambulance I was strapped into— drift past me into the distance.
Chapter Twenty-Two: To the Hospital on the Hill
Bright, white light pours into my eyes, which have opened themselves slowly. I clench them closed again, hoping to push the light out. For...
Chapter Twenty-One: Countdown to Surrender
COUNTDOWN- THREE DAYS
It is mid-morning on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008. I am staring at a computer screen in my cubicle, one among many at...
Chapter Twenty: Russian Roulette
After I left my research position on the acute inpatient psychiatric unit of a Boston hospital towards the end of 2006, my life started...
Chapter Nineteen: Playing the Part
In the months following my five-year high school reunion in the summer of 2006, I drifted about in a sea of indistinguishable days. Amidst...
Chapter Eighteen: Sentenced to Life
A few weeks after my college graduation in the summer of 2006, my five-year high school reunion was upon me. I had expended a...
Chapter Seventeen: Commencing to Self-Destruct
While my fellow ‘Class of 2006’ graduates celebrated with embraces and high-fives on Commencement Day, jumping excitedly into group photos with caps and gowns,...
Chapter Sixteen: Inside a House of Cards
Dazed and confused, I was discharged from ‘The Haven’ in September of 2004 and entered an intensive outpatient day program (IOP) on the grounds...
Chapter Fifteen: A Haven from Self
A Note to the Reader: Thorough searches of my memory reserves have failed to provide me with a complete and detailed account of my...
Chapter Fourteen: Crossing the Threshold
Although the drive to the psychiatric hospital in White Plains, New York, in September 2004 was a mere fifteen minutes from home, the trip...
Chapter Thirteen: In the Muck and The Mire
There I was on my first night of Outward Bound, lying under the big Texas sky in a little town called Redford, amidst waxy...
Chapter Twelve: A Gift of Desperation
By January of my junior year in college, I had reached my first true emotional bottom. Though surrounded by people on a daily basis...
Chapter Eleven: Teetering on the Edge
Frantic, fearful, and desperate to get my life together, I returned to Cambridge in the middle of August to move into my off-campus apartment....
Chapter Ten: A ‘Victim of Circumstance’
Upon arriving home at the end of sophomore year in college, which had been devoted to hyper-control and a carefully maintained, entirely black-and-white existence,...
Chapter Nine: Is It Me Or My Meds?
Subtly and insidiously, my medications, once merely inert composites of chemicals, acquired an agency of their own and took center stage in my life...
Chapter Eight: “Forget Happiness . . . I’ve Got Control”
At no moment in my childhood-- whether in those weekday hours after school spent exploring the woods with my dog, or on the early...
Chapter Seven: Becoming Bipolar, Becoming Empowered
A newfound acceptance of my bipolar diagnosis during the winter of my freshman year at Harvard filled me to the brim with a sense...
Chapter Six: A Disease of Dis-Ease, and New Hope for a...
On the day I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 2001, I dropped my belongings in my dorm room, said...
Chapter Five: Filling the Void
When I returned to boarding school in the fall of my junior year, I brought with me not just duffel bags of clothes, athletic...
Chapter Four: Eye of the Storm
I settled into my new life in the fall of my sophomore year at a co-ed boarding school in Western Massachusetts and was convinced...
Chapter Three: At War With A Diagnosis
Note: In this third entry, it is still early on in my story. It is the fall of my ninth grade year, I am...
Chapter Two: Opening Pandora’s Box
Soon after awakening to my crisis of ‘self’, I was sent to my first therapist. My social circles had changed, and I’d begun to...
