Talking about mental illness is weird. Everyone has these ideas of what depression looks like, what anxiety looks like, what schizophrenia looks like... But really they wouldn't be able to tell someone with these illnesses if they knocked on their front door. Imagine your house is on fire. It's been burning for a long time, [...]
Author’s note: This is the full text of a long-hand letter I wrote to myself six years ago, when in the middle of an acute period of depression. While I cannot vouch for the trustworthiness of the narrator, I share it because its a raw first-person account of what it feels to be depressed. P.S. [...]
Kevin Hall's ruminations on his own suicidal thoughts. Yesterday—in front of my two younger children—I nearly choked to death on my grilled chicken dinner. What should have simply released a heavy sigh of relief in my wife’s ear at bedtime contorted into a sleepless night of revisiting another recent near miss: Last month I wanted [...]
The First Day of the Rest of My Life For as long as I can remember, I’ve always felt as if I were living two different lives: the life everyone sees and the life that only I see. In the life that everyone sees, I am a friend, a daughter, a sister, a straight-A student [...]
For as long as I can remember I have felt as if I don't belong, like I just don't fit in this world. I think that these feelings haunting me everyday are something that seriously contributed to the development of my depression. I have a hard time even pin pointing when this started but I'm [...]
When I was in high school, I would wear a bow in my hair every day. It became my signature. People in my community knew me as the happy girl with the bow. I was bow girl. When I was seventeen, my depressive symptoms arrived. I felt miserable and I didn't know why. I didn't [...]
Bipolar Tide My mind moves like the ocean, coming and going with the moon. The tide rolls in—mania, I am at the top of the world. There’s nothing I can do, mental waves crashing down. Vision distorted by emotion, can’t trust my brain anyhow. The tide rolls out-depression, I am the lowest of the lows. [...]
One Man. Talking About His Life With Depression. "I'm ready to tell my story. It's time." That's what I heard from Stuart Walker, owner of Clubhaus Fitness, a tall, muscular guy with a boisterous laugh and incredibly busy schedule. He knew I was researching Perfectly Hidden Depression. He had listened to me talk about how [...]
Destigmatizing Medication: How Psychiatric Medicine Helped Me Survive Isaac James Baker shares his personal story of how his psychiatric drugs helped to save his life, as he battled anorexia, anxiety and depression. When my psychiatrist told me he was prescribing medication, I told him, “No thanks, I’m fine.” But he insisted, rolling off an impressive [...]
When I found my father’s journals, I knew I had to stop running away from mental illness. They were at the bottom of a box containing his unpublished plays and stories that revealed his struggles during the time I was growing up. By the time I read them I was a successful psychotherapist with a [...]
