Travels Through Psychiatry

  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...

  This is the graphic that's my header. It's a synopsis of my many years in and out of psychiatric treatment presented in a humorous way, because how else could I deal with it all? And what's the rwillowfish thing? Here's the story: The complete name is Rainbow Willowfish, which came from my first time at a pagan festival called Free Spirit Gathering. I asked my friend, "Hey, what's with the nicknames these people run around with?" and she replied, "They're about the spirit within, or maybe just sounding all cool and mystical." Then she started rattling off pretend silly ones. Wolf Moonboy...Sunsong Ravenbeast...Rainbow Willowfish..."Stop!" I yelled. "That one is mine." And so it was. I'm not a dedicated pagan, a bit witchy, definitely fond of the full moon and dancing around bonfires to the beat of the drums, but a little skeptical of potions and oils and balms and directing energy and magical spells. I don't summ...

  me in my studio at art college In 1988 my friends introduced me to The Grateful Dead, taking me to 2 shows in Hartford, Connecticut. I hadn’t used LSD before, but I was a well-established stoner. The first night, some guy with sweaty palms sold us LSD tabs, and I think the LSD was sucked off into perspiration then absorbed into his skin. He was probably tripping balls, but we weren’t. I found my first Dead show to be boring. My friends exclaimed, “Boring! Didn’t the LSD…” No, no it didn’t. They told me they’d be sure it was good, effective LSD for the next show. And, oh my, it certainly was.                                                       my mementos from Grateful Dead shows I remember spinning around the perimeter of the convention center all night, my fairy skirt twirling with me, as I figured out everything about my life. I mea...

  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.         ...

  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. ...

  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...

  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...

  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...