The Franciscan By Yonder Grey When you are confirmed Catholic, the roles for you change in life. Even if you throw a fit about the Catholic church, faith in the church becomes a game of bones or hoping the pregnancy test comes back negative. At 15, confirmation classes bombarded me with all the liturgy, all [...]
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 [...]
I was told very often from family and I would say friends but I have no friends...my illness causes me to be isolated and lonely. Nevertheless, I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia & bipolar disorder, yet I was still unconvinced of what I was enduring until I saw others with similarities and I had the [...]
I have struggled with my mental health for as long as I can remember. Even as a little kid in kindergarten panic would take over and I'd run out of the cafeteria in a panic, scared of the noise and the people. It only got worse with age and constant bullying. By the age of [...]
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. [...]
*Trigger Warning: Suicide* I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital for the first time when I was 20 years old. It came after a long period of severe anorexia and malnutrition, progressive dysfunctionality and decline in my physical and mental health. What I didn't know back then, I'm 30 now, was that it's not because [...]
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 [...]
It all started when I was about 16 or 17. I was doing drugs which led to a chemical imbalance. I woke up one day feeling off, paranoid. I went to my friends house and everything was off. I didn't trust them but I stayed. We went to the movies and the paranoia was so [...]
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 [...]
*Trigger Warning - Suicide* I am 70 years old. My story won't end stigmatization. It was around in the earlier years of my life and it is still around. It doesn't bother me much 'cause I don't wear a flag'. "Crazy" is not 'who' I am. Schizophrenia is my diagnosis. In Canada, the disorder [...]
