A birthday party in my Chicano family looks something like this: all of my aunts are in the kitchen frying up tacos to eat with homemade rice, beans, and fideo while my uncles and the cousins are all scattered around the house, cracking jokes, watching sports, playing with the family babies, but mostly waiting for [...]
You Always Deserve It *Trigger warning* - for examples of untreated eating disorder and depression symptoms and behaviors 8:00 AM - your alarm goes off. It’s a below-freezing January morning. Even though you got well over eight hours of sleep last night, you don’t have class for another few hours and all you want to [...]
My story is like any other book in an enormous library. Kept for records, collecting dust, sitting in an isolated nook in a forgotten corner. I'm not trying to downplay my struggles. I know that every story has its purpose. It's measure of influence on lives and society. But I also don't want to come [...]
In a world without stigma, the last four years of my family’s lives would have been very different. In late 2011 we had lost our family business which was tough but we quickly began the process of rebuilding our lives, my wife Jm found employment whilst I worked from home. Jm was previously diagnosed with [...]
Living In A Grey World The first time I ever purged was in the bathroom of a Friendly's restaurant at the age of 15. I had just finished eating a colossal burger, french fries, and chocolate ice cream with hot fudge and gummy bears. You may be thinking, "after eating that combination of food no [...]
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 [...]
There is no single origin story for mental illness. There are genes and what passes through them; there are early onset signs that may be treated if they weren’t missed or ignored; there are traumas that bring forth something in the brain’s chemistry that wouldn’t have reared its ugly head otherwise; but there is not [...]
Obesity is not an epidemic. There is a reason we say something popular online has gone “viral”; because it resembles the uncontrollable spread of a virus. People don’t go around injecting random strangers with virus-filled syringes, or spraying them in the face with virus-laced chemicals. These types of outbreaks occur in spite of the best [...]
You are not your eating disorder Hi, I’m Erica. I’m 27. I am a wife, a daughter, a dog owner, a psychology research assistant, an athlete, and a friend. I am in recovery from anorexia nervosa, and I am here to take you beneath the surface of an eating disorder. I can’t remember the last time [...]
Knowledge is Power For many of us it starts when we are small. For many of us it continues through adolescent and teen years. For many of us we grow up unscathed from childhood issues, taunting, or typical “rites of passage” intended to mold us into adulthood. For many of us, this is not the [...]
