This short story is about not being a prisoner to mental illness. I myself suffer from mental illness (bipolar depression) and it has been a year and a half since I attempted to take my own life. Every day is a struggle and our illness should not hold us back from living the lives we [...]
There's been a lot of talk recently about the stigma of mental illness. There's only one way to erase a stigma, and that's by shining a light on individual stories. This is mine ... I have Bipolar Disorder. I first showed signs of the disease in my teens, but wasn't diagnosed until last year. Don't [...]
My Survival Story In the midst of one the worst depressive episodes I had ever endured I made the decision to end my life. I was meticulous in the details and in the execution of my plan. Depression told me that I was worthless, a failure in all aspects of my life. Repeating poor choice [...]
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 [...]
I have struggled with depression for many years. Growing up, I was always bullied and abused by people in and out of my family. I had low self esteem and always thought the worst. I had really bad anxiety, depression, etc. Freshman year, I moved to South Carolina where I thought things would get better. [...]
When you're a teenager one of the last places you expect to end up is on the psychiatric unit of a hospital. Yet that's where I found myself one day when I was 15. My Mother and I had gotten to the emergency department at the city hospital pretty late at night from what I [...]
“How did I get here?” It’s a question I used to obsess over, feeling distraught over what I felt were the world’s standards for my age versus what I had actually accomplished at that point in time. I grieved how much I felt was stolen from me because of my mental illness and wondered if [...]
Getting Through an Episode The curtain opens. I am Jonathan. I have schizophrenia. I don’t want to make a big introduction. Perhaps some of you have read my work before. For me, schizophrenia is similar to what I have read. In the early material, from such turn-of-the-century psychiatrists as Kraepelin and Bleuler, there seems to [...]
I took a bottle of pills when I was fifteen. It wasn’t the right kind, or maybe it was, depending on the desired result. But I was trying to die and I didn’t, so I guess it was the wrong or right kind of pills. I took them to drown out the guilt, the anger. [...]
“The person who completes suicide, dies once. Those left behind die a thousand deaths, trying to relive those terrible moments and understand … Why?” – Clark (2001) I cry every time I speak in public about Jerry’s suicide. Jerry was my little brother. He was 35 and left behind his wife and two little boys. [...]
