Hi, my name is Adrian Fletcher. I am a psychologist, trauma therapist, consultant, speaker, and writer. I live with both Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) formally known as Multiple Personality Disorder. In 2017 after an attempt at my own life I spent time in a psychiatric hospital and residential treatment facility. [...]
Hello, My story is not unique, unfortunately. So many young boys are brutalized by family members and go on to live in chasms of despair, confusion and self-hate unnecessarily. Silence is a killer. Victims must feel free to speak up without fear of reprisal or subjugation. My abuse was at the hands of my father [...]
**Trigger warning: suicide attempt** I was 18 and sitting in the bathtub; now cold. I had just received a text from my then partner reading “I am walking on eggshells with you. You are so passionate I'm not sure what it is or what to call it, but I don’t think I can give you [...]
My girlfriend and I have been together for quite a while and I'm proposing soon. It's going very well and we're very happy, but both of us are traumatized, and continuing to be so due to where we live, and that can cause some issues. Here's a little insight on the problems caused by two [...]
*Trigger Warning: Suicide* I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital for the first time when I was 20 years old. It came after a long period of severe anorexia and malnutrition, progressive dysfunctionality and decline in my physical and mental health. What I didn't know back then, I'm 30 now, was that it's not because [...]
My mental illness feels like a sucking black hole most of the time. On a good day I feel like I have something pressing down on my chest, making it hard for me to breath. That’s my panic attacks. The sucking black hole is my major depressive disorder and agoraphobia. I have suffered with mental [...]
Thinking back to my childhood, I believe that even back then there were obvious signs of what I insist on calling “a restless mind.” I remember always being a very agitated child, in my head mostly, and this has persisted into adulthood. When I was a child, gradually more and more, I distanced myself from [...]
It all started when I was about 16 or 17. I was doing drugs which led to a chemical imbalance. I woke up one day feeling off, paranoid. I went to my friends house and everything was off. I didn't trust them but I stayed. We went to the movies and the paranoia was so [...]
On bad days, I don’t know where the anxiety stops and the chronic pain begins. The tightening in my chest could be warning of a panic attack or of a fibromyalgia flare that will spread across my chest, down my arms and into my hands, rendering me unable to write – both my work and [...]
*Trigger Warning - Sexually Explicit, Self-Harm* Worrying about Worrying But somewhere in my soul, I know I’ve met the thing before. Real Riches, - Emily Dickinson It is healthy to worry. It is okay to worry. If we didn’t worry, we wouldn’t plan for things and have backups and contingencies in place. Worry [...]
