Family members are often told that the refusal to take psychiatric medication is an irrational reaction driven by their loved one’s mental health symptoms. The term anosognosia, a mystifyingly long and obscure bit of medical verbiage, is often employed. Anosognosia is a word used to describe a lack of insight. Insight is the understanding that [...]
Show me a psychotic child and I will write you a tragedy. "Your boy is sick," the fire chief said. "And very dangerous." No one had ever laughed when shown photos of burned bodies. Teachers, however, praised the unkempt loner who rode a skateboard, wore tie-dyed jeans, and excelled in mathematics, philosophy, and foreign languages. [...]
Thinking back to my childhood, I believe that even back then there were obvious signs of what I insist on calling “a restless mind.” I remember always being a very agitated child, in my head mostly, and this has persisted into adulthood. When I was a child, gradually more and more, I distanced myself from [...]
I deal with voices, I am thinking about coming off of the medication and be apart of the hearing voices network. My voices aren't really hostile, they can be and have before like when I went into a ward to stay for awhile, they have been. But I know now what to expect and what [...]
In the spring of 2015, after a stay in a psychiatric ward, I was diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. For a long time, I struggled to accept my illness. I was ashamed of it. The very idea of talking about it to anyone was embarrassing to me as if having a mental illness made me [...]
*trigger warning - self-harm* When I first became mentally unwell, I never thought I'd be here now, sharing my story—a survivor of my own minds torment. I was 16 when I was first diagnosed with clinical depression. I was in such a dark place, scared of the thoughts in my head, scared of what people [...]
