I realized something was different when I was in grade school. When I was six, the compulsions were small – like scratching my nose exactly five times or touching part of my bedpost before I went to sleep. But as I grew, so did they. Even though we were not a religious Jewish family, I [...]
My journey into mental illness is very recent. I have always been an advocate of taking medication for depression and other related illnesses. I’ve had family members who have struggled with mental illness. I believe in the power of good talk therapy and good psychiatric treatment. And yet, armed with this history and knowledge, I [...]
“Be proud of who you are” they say. “Be proud of being a gay man,” they say. From outward appearances, LGBT look like a group who don’t really care what people think. Thousands of them will walk down crowded boulevards this month during Pride parades wearing assless chaps, glitter high heels or spandex costumes. Obviously, [...]
I’m 50 years old, and I have PTSD that is probably complicated by traumatic brain injury. To look at me you wouldn’t know, but I have an EEG scan of my brain to prove it. Until recently, I didn’t know what it was like to not feel anxiety, depression, paranoia, shame and a nagging belief [...]
ME: Mental illness roared into our family like a freight train in the winter of 2002, when he was seven years old. It was probably always there, like a whisper in the distant woods and even though we knew it was eventually going to find us, there was nothing that could be done to prepare [...]
Survival by Katheryne Patterson It was at 18 that I discovered I had a family history of depression. There was Athie, my great grandmother who received shock treatments and was unable to care for her last child, my grandfather with a gun pressed against his temple, and the cousin who drowned himself in a creek [...]
I was standing there, head lowered down as low as it could possibly go. The bailiff had just told me to rise as some honorable judge made his way through the courtroom and took a seat on his iron throne. Not a single fuck was given. That day as the antipsychotic medication I’d been forcibly [...]
The words jolted me to a frightening place I never want to re-visit. "You know with 100 percent certainty you won't be able to feel joy that day. That's the most profoundly damaging aspect of depression." Spoken by Canadian sportscaster Michael Landsberg in today's cover story in the Washington Post, "Unwell and unashamed," I felt [...]
I received a meme once from a friend that said “Someone’s therapist knows all about you” and it dawned on me how scarily accurate that probably was. I’ve left quite the wake in my 37 years of life and not all of it has been sunshine and roses. The majority of my life, save the [...]
I’m eight years old, sitting alone in my room; Dr. Phil is playing on the TV. A blonde woman is crying about her inability to wear red or associate with numbers that say 666. I can’t tear my eyes away. The same red shirt has hung in my closet for the last year because I [...]
