stigma

/Tag: stigma

Tanya Contois

My mental illness feels like a sucking black hole most of the time. On a good day I feel like I have something pressing down on my chest, making it hard for me to breath. That’s my panic attacks. The sucking black hole is my major depressive disorder and agoraphobia. I have suffered with mental [...]

Tiziano Brignoli

Thinking back to my childhood, I believe that even back then there were obvious signs of what I insist on calling “a restless mind.” I remember always being a very agitated child, in my head mostly, and this has persisted into adulthood. When I was a child, gradually more and more, I distanced myself from [...]

Zsakir Clark

It all started when I was about 16 or 17. I was doing drugs which led to a chemical imbalance. I woke up one day feeling off, paranoid. I went to my friends house and everything was off. I didn't trust them but I stayed. We went to the movies and the paranoia was so [...]

Michelle Kelly

On bad days, I don’t know where the anxiety stops and the chronic pain begins. The tightening in my chest could be warning of a panic attack or of a fibromyalgia flare that will spread across my chest, down my arms and into my hands, rendering me unable to write – both my work and [...]

Thomas Harrison

*Trigger Warning - Sexually Explicit, Self-Harm*   Worrying about Worrying But somewhere in my soul, I know I’ve met the thing before. Real Riches, - Emily Dickinson   It is healthy to worry. It is okay to worry. If we didn’t worry, we wouldn’t plan for things and have backups and contingencies in place. Worry [...]

Katie Parr

What is the form of your thoughts? A poem for my body, this vessel of life. Sacred embodiment, yet struggling still. How to not forget. The shadows and the light. The undulating fields of color and the walls of sound. My restless mind. Or perhaps it was something else? Was it inside or outside? How [...]

David W. Wilson

*Trigger Warning - Suicide*   I am 70 years old. My story won't end stigmatization. It was around in the earlier years of my life and it is still around. It doesn't bother me much 'cause I don't wear a flag'. "Crazy" is not 'who' I am. Schizophrenia is my diagnosis. In Canada, the disorder [...]

Shivam Kapoor

It's been 6 years but the memory of my first panic attack is as fresh as it happened yesterday. It was my first day to my job after graduation and I was travelling to work on the metro train. Suddenly, I noticed my chest was getting tightly grabbed from inside, there was no pain just [...]

By |2022-02-13T11:35:51-08:00February 16th, 2022|Categories: Anxiety, Panic, Stigma Fighters|Tags: , , , , , |0 Comments

Sophia Falco

*Note: These poems are not a series but rather individual poems that stand by themselves*   Pinwheels Purple clouds spin like pinwheels I shoot my crimson arrow droplets burst my soul falls with them still my ego is drenched with sorrow. I shoot my crimson arrow I am high as that child’s kite still my [...]