I sit back in my room right now and think how can I be useful member of the society. Like many people would say it – get up and get going. It sounds so easy to just get up and start realizing your dreams. All you need is to take one step. But this is [...]
My daughter was born on my father's 51st birthday. As I lay in my hospital bed watching him cradle his first grandchild, I hoped and prayed that the baby would make a difference. At the same time, I knew not to expect a miracle. Just weeks before giving birth I had been in the emergency [...]
Bright and early one Monday morning my phone rang. I saw with shock that it was my dad, awake and calling before 7 a.m. Clearly something was wrong. "Could you stop by on the way to work?" he asked, sounding cheery. I sighed. I was already squeezing in a workout and still hoping to get [...]
My grandmother is one of the great loves of my life. It’s a child-like love that is reckless and without boundary. As a kid, I always knew that my grandmother – Nani - loved me. While I offered cuddles, Nani offered chores. I think of it as army-style affection. You know… The cold and commanding [...]
I have always had what I believed to be a normal life: childhood with ice-cream and delightful summers, good grades and compliments from my teachers, slightly risky teens with a few of stupid decisions (nothing too serious), confusing enter into my twenties and just as I turned 25 I started to wake up… Nothing extremely [...]
being radicalised is not a form of insanity by dm gillis Since the tragic events unfolded in Ottawa, everyone has become a psychiatrist, claiming that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was everything from a whacko to deranged. But really, no one will ever know what his mental state was at the time of his horrible crime. At a press [...]
Take Your Meds by dm gillis FYI, telling a person who you know has a mental disability to ‘take your meds’ when you disagree with her or him, is bigotry. It’s also a cheap and lazy way to make your point in a conversation. It’s the same as calling them a psycho, a mental case, [...]
Carrying the Message By Bruce Ario With the onset of my illness, I felt I had a lot to prove. What it boiled down to is that I had to prove my self-worth. My ego required some kind of reaction to my diagnosis of schizophrenia. At first my reactions were private and clandestine. I felt [...]
I am what my therapist and doctor call “high-functioning.” I have major depression and anxiety disorder, but like many with this illness, you would not be able to tell by looking at me. I am able to get groceries, read books I like, and participate in life, MOST of the time. One of the rotten [...]
OPEN LETTER TO SOCIETY Dear society, People who suffer from mental illness are not second-class citizens. They are not jokes, they are not puns, they are not attention-seekers. Their lives are not worth any less than your own and their illnesses are no different from those you call 'physical', as if though the brain was [...]
