self-portraits

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I Guess I’m Still Shrunk

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  I’ve endured some awful treatment in 45 years with mental illness. It’s happened in encountering bad psychiatrists, bad psych units, and in dealing with each decade’s best and worst offerings. I carry around deep feelings.There were situations I walked away from never to be the same person.Those stay with me. I’m hardened and desensitized and wiser and more sensitive. I will stand by my need for treatment, no matter what I stumble into. I’m firm in this. The very thought of turning aspects of my mental illness, and how psychiatrists and therapists dealt with me, into an enterprise against the idea of mental illness itself hits as an attack on not only me, but anyone with mental illness. How could I assert with tremendous confidence that my experiences are everyone’s and that I have the knowledge, as if I’ve been to the mountaintop, to formulate a new way forward that rejects psychiatry and ignores all progress in the field. I won’t casually glance at psychiatry’s inherent...
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My Girl Interrupted Years

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  I watched Girl, Interrupted last night. I cried a lot. My girlfriend took me to see this movie in 1999, in San Francisco, when it hit theatres. Her motives were simple. She was always searching for any potential on screen lesbian action. She missed how relatable this film would be to me, how it would stir up my feelings about psych unit stays, especially my first one. Toward the end of high school, I spent 2 months inpatient. This was 10 years past the era of the movie, on a different sort of ward, but close enough. The movie patients were parts of me and parts of others I’d met along the way. My identification with the main character Susanna was so strong, so powerful. I had to tune it all out. I made myself turn away and then forget or at least suppress. Nobody around me would understand and my girlfriend didn’t have that as her focus. It wasn’t at all on her radar screen. Recently I’ve been working in therapy on recognizing myself and being my own person. I’m fascinated wi...
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Tangled Up in Points of View

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  Mental illness, places it occupies, are 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 and dissociated parts and degrees of willingness to participate in treatment.         ...
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