For everyone with depression, the experience is different. But you wouldn't know it from our societal image of the black dog. A million and one cookie-cutter 'signs and symptoms' pieces online, will blithely tell you the things to look for. Sleeping too much or not enough, isolating, lack of personal care and loss of interest, [...]
What's it Like to Feel Crazy? The other day at work, I couldn’t take any more. I grabbed my water bottle and keys and followed the road near my office complex until it led me to the highway. For 45 minutes, I drove. Where I went didn't matter. The trees blurred past my car windows [...]
Wrestling for Control of My Mental Health Mental illness is a unique issue in that everybody has an opinion about what it is, how to treat it, the use/efficacy of medication, etc. Often, the person suffering doesn’t have a voice. In the past, I worked as a caretaker and nursing assistant for patients with physical [...]
TINYLETTER.COM/CRYING Eve Peyser I began sending out a newsletter every time I cried because I thought it would be funny. A compulsive journaler obsessed with keeping track of my various mental health issues—depression, anxiety, severe suicidal ideation, ADHD—I never had much desire to keep any of my mental health issues a secret. Talking about what [...]
Spectrum. It's a lovely, loaded word. I like it. Disorder? Thats where you're wrong, kiddo. I have Asperger's Syndrome. What I've just told you tells you nothing. If you meet one person with Autism, you've met only one kind of Autism. The potentialities of the human mind are infinite. Our neurons separate us from the [...]
My heart is telling me I need to leave and get out of town. My stomach is so nervous, it is threatening to wage a war and force me to completely shut down. This stupid blinking line is taunting me, saying I’m too scared to write the about ripples of 2016 that shattered me. Why [...]
I was born in the state of infancy to a working-class couple who were young and inexperienced. By the end of their 20s they had four children, the third of which was me. I was a very anxious baby such that I screamed and cried in my mother’s absence. I was so inconsolable I had [...]
You Are Not Your Eating Disorder Of all of the ups and downs we have experienced with our son’s illness; the hospitalization and the setbacks, one of the hardest is hearing my son apologize for his condition. A recent experience really brought to light for me just how much my son feels he has to [...]
Hello, I am a beautiful soul that has Borderline Personality Disorder. I have lived with it for 52 years, 41 of those completely undiagnosed. I was molested by my dad from the ages of 3 to 13, of which I started remembering in 2005 which was long after the event, long after the drug addiction [...]
Depression: Thinking in Metaphors I am depressed. The realization comes barreling down on me like a truck with no brakes, slamming headlong as splinters and shards slice open my reality. But the doctor isn’t in the office today. And it’s the weekend. And the counselor has no available openings for months. And I realize that [...]
