self-portraits

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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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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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