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On My Travels through Psychiatry

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  I’ve met people and I’ve learned from them as I faced sudden withdrawal from years of being overmedicated, and as I rejected psychiatry very angrily, and as I gradually transitioned into taking up psychiatric treatment again. I’m at a certain point. I know a great deal about being a psych patient, the harms and the helps therein, and a fair amount about critical psychiatry. But I don’t know all of the personal experiences and nuance and I never will. I continuously pursue clarity regardless. I’ve been reading blog posts and articles and listening to podcasts over the past few years, all dealing with aspects of diagnosis and treatment and how patients operate within and outside of frameworks. Along with that, I post on social media and engage in discussions. I do my own writing. I think long and hard and roll ideas around when my mind can focus. For years, due to meds issues and lack of adequate help with my problems, I couldn’t stay with reading a book. Now I can. I’ve recently r...
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Life Beside Mental Illness

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  self-portraits from 1980 My first psych hospitalization lasted two months. I was 17 years old. My psychiatrist discharged me in February, and I caught up on all my schoolwork by April so I could graduate with my class. That fall, I enrolled at a university but freaked out on day one and left. Instead, I went on a job search. The first opening I saw, in the want ads of the newspaper, specified doing lab work, night shift, call this number if interested. I was and I called. I wanted to stay busy, not to deny my mental illness or make a misguided attempt to avoid it, but because I had the desire to live my life. In this blog post, my aim is to show that mental illness hasn't blunted my life, hasn't numbed me to the flavor and variety in living, but is an interruption. The stops and starts don't prevent me from getting back on the horse. I illustrate how mental illness operates side by side with having a "regular" life. I offer the example of my start in treatment...
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When Crisis Intake Undergoes Beneficial Changes

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  Seeking help in a mental health crisis is daunting, especially when that involves entering the emergency department (ED) at a hospital. For me, it’s always been like stepping through a portal into a realm with no certainty of respect, efficiency, or good choices. Yet, step one in accessing acute care starts in the ED, where blood and urine tests and EKGs are run, and where mental health assessments happen, and where the wait time for an available psych bed can become excruciatingly slow. I’ve often been through ED screening and always thought it could be done less harshly, without the sharp edges, in a way that doesn’t leave me, and other patients, further traumatized. And now, a hospital in my area has invested funds into improving the psych ED experience, providing a specialized waiting area and an alternative to psych unit inpatient stays. This is long overdue and will hopefully become a model for many other healthcare systems. (In this blog post, I won’t be naming the hospita...
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Beyond Awareness

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  I’ve been called by these two descriptors throughout my life: inconsistent and elusive. At this point, rather than hearing those as insults, I accept. It’s not that I embrace; I accept. My life has been a series of partial accomplishments that I abandon. My life has been a series of friendships that I let drift off with the wind. My life has been about gathering courage and belief in self and desire to reach a vision, taking steps, impressing myself, then hitting fear. I’ve left jobs and schools and projects and groups because I became afraid and self-conscious about others seeing me stumble. Even the mental illness I carry around, bipolar disorder, is about cycling through highs, and then falling into lows, potentially losing my way as I shift and rock to and fro. I’d like to know more about my patterns, at least in this regard. I see a therapist now who makes me feel comfortable and I talk on and for an hour, going over my history and how I function. My therapist says I have ...
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Why I Need to Call it Mental Illness

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  My mind and body balance all aspects of me so well at times, then not. I’ll be thinking I really have it together, creatively drawing and painting, enjoying cooking and tidying and going out for walks, even liking some light socializing out in the big world. My goal is to move forward, carrying stability achieved as I accomplish and develop more skill and expression in art, as I find home activities and exercise and being in real life more natural and less infused with anxiety and need to force myself. So, there I’ll be, pulling elements of good life for me together, and then a small piece breaks off. Maybe I’m extra tired, or maybe I get a twinge of how useless it all is, or maybe the buzz of doing gets so exciting it spins all colors into a whiteout and I can’t tell what I’m moving through. So, I stop, a little bit, joined by more bits, until I’m walled in by what I feel I can’t do, until I’m paralyzed inside, just gazing out a small window and wondering, so bitterly, why eve...
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Finding My Way Out of Anti-Psychiatry: A Patient Perspective

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  I wrote a guest blog post for Psychiatry at the Margins, which is available to read at this link: link to Psychiatry at the Margins
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That Imprint Stays

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  For me, psychiatric treatment began in 1980 and I thought it ended in 2019. I’d only found misunderstanding, abuse, bad attitudes, and overmedicating there, culminating in a psychiatrist stopping 5 of my 7 meds without any taper, leaving me with nothing but a deep imprint on my psyche. But I’ve always clawed my way out of the pit, chipped and bruised, and this last insult is no exception. So, how have I been recovering from all that badness in the name of care? There’s no guide for healing and finding goodness again after mistreatment in mental health systems, so I improvise. And I follow what feels right to do, trust my intuition, because I don’t want to sink into an abyss. At first, my anger spilled all over the place, into every relationship, online, and into the mental health center complaint department. I was like an evangelist shouting about psychiatry’s evils to the populace, determined to save some souls and have justice prevail. After quite a while of this, I simmere...
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