Living with Mental Illness: Better Doesn't Mean Cured Sometimes, I feel that I don’t know what’s going on or that I don’t care about anything. I am confused by my feelings, because I’m not able to explain how I feel, except for the emptiness, and I feel that no one is really there for [...]
I AM A STIGMA FIGHTER I should make clear from the very start that I am not a soldier. Nor, am I or ever was a trained first responder. Far from it, at the time of the tsunami, I had recently graduated university and had just left my home in London to start a new [...]
Facing Life - Heidi DiTonno I don't consider myself mentally ill, although my diagnoses would disagree with me. They are stigmas for my way of having to cope with situations that I somehow had to find a way to survive. And they worked for me, here I am! Burned and severely facially disfigured at 9 [...]
I don’t see myself as a person with a mental disorder. I don’t buy into thrown-around labels and insults. Deep within my core, I believe we all have differences: Maybe your trauma was a car accident that threw your Civic off the highway, and every time you drive that stretch your knees buckle, reminding you [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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’. [...]
PTSD - My Own Personal Human Bondage I may not have went to war to have the traumatic effects of PTSD, but I do have the emotional capacity to be a bit broken down by them. My life started out dramatically to two parents who never really gave a shit of whether I lived or [...]
First of all, howdy y'all! My name is Carisa. I'm 38 years old. Before we get too deep into the sludge of shit I constantly weigh through daily, I'd like to tell you how and why I chose to submit this essay to Stigma Fighters. I was asked by a dear friend, whom is also [...]
ENDING STIGMA ESSAY by Bif Naked I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to these unceded lands of The Coast Salish Territories, and made my home here in 1991. Vancouver held so much promise, and was rumored to be a great solution for people living in the colder climates of Canada, who may be looking for [...]
