Stigma Fighters

/Stigma Fighters

Yasemin Karisma

After withdrawing from the college of my choice in a state of depression, I returned home and experienced depersonalization. It felt like I was in a Snoopy cartoon where the adults were talking but it sounded like nonsense. In other words, my body felt disconnected from the my mind, my brain and my emotions. I [...]

Theo Karantsalis

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. [...]

Matjaz

*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 [...]

Tanya Contois

My mental illness feels like a sucking black hole most of the time. On a good day I feel like I have something pressing down on my chest, making it hard for me to breath. That’s my panic attacks. The sucking black hole is my major depressive disorder and agoraphobia. I have suffered with mental [...]

Tiziano Brignoli

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 [...]

Zsakir Clark

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 [...]

Lily

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 [...]

Alexander Lim

*Trigger Warning: Self-harm, Suicide* My name is Alex. I've been diagnosed with a moderate level of depression and anxiety, and all my life, I've wondered why I was living. I constantly questioned my own morals, every action I took, and the universe itself. I even quit my religion, because I believe no perfect God would [...]

Michelle Kelly

On bad days, I don’t know where the anxiety stops and the chronic pain begins. The tightening in my chest could be warning of a panic attack or of a fibromyalgia flare that will spread across my chest, down my arms and into my hands, rendering me unable to write – both my work and [...]

Thomas Harrison

*Trigger Warning - Sexually Explicit, Self-Harm*   Worrying about Worrying But somewhere in my soul, I know I’ve met the thing before. Real Riches, - Emily Dickinson   It is healthy to worry. It is okay to worry. If we didn’t worry, we wouldn’t plan for things and have backups and contingencies in place. Worry [...]