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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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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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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