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 [...]
I Am Surely Dying... It truly amazes me how in the matter of just a few days, my body and my brain, can completely double cross me... A friend of mine recently posted how we are less than 200 days away from Christmas. This had me thinking about last Christmas and my immediate family that [...]
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 [...]
Read part 1 here. Samantha soon warned me that in the not-so-distant future, she would possibly not be in contact with me for a few days, and I accepted it, because I loved her, and I knew it was something she had to do. She ended up breaking her promise, and I got to see [...]
I was asked to write this piece a couple weeks ago, and I started to write it quite a few times. I wrote some of it down here, and erased it. I wrote some elsewhere, and scrapped it. I wrote pages upon pages in my head, and tossed them aside, along with all the useless [...]
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 [...]
