I avoid talking to strangers! I am never comfortable in unfamiliar company, and wary of half the world it seems! There is one stranger who just won’t let me be, one who I am especially afraid of! She tells me that I am capable of terrible things. I pray to GOD I’m not! She hints [...]
Crazy, mental, out of it, slacker, sensitive, I've been called all of them either to my face or behind my back. I'm not allowed to have emotions. If I'm having a down day I'm getting depressed again; if I'm anxious about finances, he's having a panic attack. Even on my good days people talk and [...]
When the silence is deafening I recently read a statistic that said one in four people in the US experience some type of mental health challenge. This got me thinking, who are the other three? Having experienced a mental health crisis with my son just a couple years ago, I can tell you that from [...]
Terror. Escape. Shut-down. Repeat. I was abused, neglected, and traumatized when I was a kid. At-the-hands-of-a-sadist kind of thing. In the fallout I developed Complex PTSD, something that’s robbed me of most of my life. When Sarah Fader asked me to write an essay for Stigma Fighters I knew what would happen. Because I’d been through it so many [...]
We all have anxiety. It's our body's response to stressful situations. It's our body's way of telling us to be wary of situations that make us feel uncomfortable. It's our body's response to fight or flight. But what do you do when your body is constantly in that state? Hide? Run? But where to? You [...]
The Stigma of Depression “It’s all in your head”. Yes, unfortunately it is in my head. And my gastro-intestinal system. And muscles. And my checking account. And the hole that once resided a social life. Manic depression – specifically, and mental health issues in general – takes no prisoners and often solicits little understanding. We [...]
I was brought to Stigma Fighters by a friend that had written for the site, and I returned again and again reading many stories that resonated. But I asked myself, what stigma am I fighting and what have I fought? And I come up with ‘labels’. I’m that person who came from a ‘broken home’. [...]
It begins as a slight dizziness, and when I recognize that I’m dizzy, it gets worse and is followed by a tingling sensation in my stomach—almost like butterflies, but much more pronounced. Breathing becomes difficult, black dots dance in front of my eyes. Adrenalin shoots through my body, my skin gets hot and prickly. I’m [...]
On and off since the age of 10, I've been somewhere in the mental healthcare system. That's almost 18 years of treatment (mostly medication) and a whole host of diagnoses: major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and PTSD. Sometimes, it feels as though my life is made up of a series of waves [...]
I developed harming obsessions when I was 10 years old. The year was 1984 and virtually nothing was publicly known or discussed about the phenomena that today we know to be obsessive compulsive disorder. I was a grubby farm kid walking barefoot through pastures dotted with piles of cow manure and playing with the new batches [...]
