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Tangled Up in Points of View

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  painting I made about my history of mental illness treatment tiltled Hard Stories to Tell It’s messy and raw and if you tried to firsthand report, jumping in gonzo journalism style, you’d be confused about where to start and how to get an opening and where to end. You’d be shut down. Patients are protective, especially if they’ve been around, and back, and around again. Like me. The only order in going into psychiatric hospitals is what they don’t let you have. The only way to know what other patients think and how their lives are is to be locked in a ward with them. But it’s still elusive. There’s a lot of chaos there and hidden emotions. I’d believe I knew the patterns in mental illness and had concrete answers when it was impossible to make such formulations. Conclusions about mental illness can’t be drawn with certainty, even after sharing experiences from all walks of life with people in all kinds of mixed states of gender and dissociated parts and degrees of willing...
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My Past Selves

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  I don’t want to speak for this child I once was. That was long ago. She’s part of me but she didn’t sign up for anything. She didn’t give permission to be a witness or an example or a symbol of what happened to me as far as mental illness, as far as treatment. I won’t sacrifice her in the name of promoting my causes. I won’t spoil her innocence and ownership of self to say, oh look, the bad started here. Look at the conditions. Because she’s not part of judgments I hold as an adult. Is there even value in propping up one’s past self in that way? I mean, whether it’s to show contrast between the potential and what that became? Or to show where all of these confusing and turbulent present conditions started, is there value? I’m feeling that a case could be made but needs to be balanced against actually using an idea of my younger self to do so. How can I know if it’s ethical in the sense of presuming to know what I thought then and what hopes and disappointments I faced. ...
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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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