I Am Not My Illness I was drowning. Water was filling my lungs, and I couldn’t breathe. The world seemed to dance around me, but I only saw it through my blurry vision blocked by water. I was gasping, sputtering, coughing; I was trying everything that I could think of to keep breathing. My hands [...]
Reflections on Overcoming Stigma to Pay Forward Back when I was just a yuppie, I learned a few points of wisdom that I want to pay forward to some mental health academics and administrators. I was learning to chop cheese steaks at a Korean owned deli and instantly enamored with this mentor on the grill, [...]
There’s so much that I could truly say, but would it make sense whenever I said it, probably not. But it’s always worth a shot right. Truth is, even whenever it seems like its not the right thing to do, don’t be afraid to take a chance. That’s what I live by. What doesn’t kill [...]
Tennessee Williams said a writer should never be embarrassed. That great playwright’s nakedly honest writing is filled with painful truths about human nature, drawn from his own experiences, observations, and relentless self-scrutiny. I took his words as inspiration during the many difficult times in writing my recently published memoir The Broken Places. Once I made [...]
Beautifully Broken “The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.” E.E. Cummings I remember feeling different when I started third grade, as though there was an impenetrable glass wall between myself and my peers. I could see them, I could hear them, but [...]
I struggled with an all or nothing mentality for a long time starting in my teens. I was either obsessed with something or had no interest in it whatsoever. I was was either happy or sad. I had no middle ground. The line that separated these ideas was thin leaving little room for the gray [...]
It was three years ago - almost to the day now. I only know that because Facebook reminds me. Most of the first year of my son's life is gone, lost, erased from my memory. Before he was born I knew nothing about traumatic births. I thought that postpartum depression was middle class White women [...]
“But whatever you do, between now and our next session, DON’T google Borderline Personality Disorder. Why? Because you aren’t going to like what you read. A lot of it will be misinformation, and it will make you out to be a monster. You have a treatable mental health diagnosis, with a very good chance for [...]
The sliver of light coming under the door of the windowless office seemed unbearably bright and offensive. I turned away from it and closed my eyes. In a few moments, I would be asleep again. I was supposed to be out seeing patients, but it was all I could do to show up at work [...]
Fighting the Deluge I have told my story more times than I care to count. It is a staple of rehab: you start at childhood and narrate through your addiction. You tell the sordid story of your suffering until you reach the heartwarming conclusion where everyone hears what you learned and how you are all [...]
