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Moving ‘Beyond the Medical Model’: HELP WANTED
In February, the blog entitled, ‘A New Film Called ‘Beyond the Medical Model’ announced the impending release of the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community’s first full-length film. The 67-minute...
View ArticleChapter Thirteen: In the Muck and The Mire
There I was on my first night of Outward Bound, lying under the big Texas sky in a little town called Redford, amidst waxy creosote bushes, pointy ocotillo plants, and prickly pear cacti. The desert...
View ArticleChapter Twelve: A Gift of Desperation
By January of my junior year in college, I had reached my first true emotional bottom. Though surrounded by people on a daily basis in crowded Harvard Square, I was more alone than I’d ever been in my...
View ArticleChapter Eleven: Teetering on the Edge
Frantic, fearful, and desperate to get my life together, I returned to Cambridge in the middle of August to move into my off-campus apartment. I believed that those summer months had been a complete...
View ArticleChapter Ten: A ‘Victim of Circumstance’
Upon arriving home at the end of sophomore year in college, which had been devoted to hyper-control and a carefully maintained, entirely black-and-white existence, I quickly realized, to my dismay,...
View ArticleChapter Nine: Is It Me Or My Meds?
Subtly and insidiously, my medications, once merely inert composites of chemicals, acquired an agency of their own and took center stage in my life as sophomore year began to wind down. I was not...
View ArticleChapter Eight: “Forget Happiness . . . I’ve Got Control”
At no moment in my childhood-- whether in those weekday hours after school spent exploring the woods with my dog, or on the early Sunday mornings in winter when I champed at the bit to get to center...
View ArticleChapter Seven: Becoming Bipolar, Becoming Empowered
A newfound acceptance of my bipolar diagnosis during the winter of my freshman year at Harvard filled me to the brim with a sense of rejuvenation. Within the first few weeks, I’d eased into a...
View ArticleChapter Six: A Disease of Dis-Ease, and New Hope for a Cure
On the day I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 2001, I dropped my belongings in my dorm room, said goodbye to my family, and realized, once alone, that I had no idea where I was. I spent...
View ArticleChapter Five: Filling the Void
When I returned to boarding school in the fall of my junior year, I brought with me not just duffel bags of clothes, athletic equipment, and sheets and towels, but also an eating disorder. Up until a...
View ArticleChapter Four: Eye of the Storm
I settled into my new life in the fall of my sophomore year at a co-ed boarding school in Western Massachusetts and was convinced that my problems would quickly resolve themselves. I was sure that it...
View ArticleChapter Three: At War With A Diagnosis
Note: In this third entry, it is still early on in my story. It is the fall of my ninth grade year, I am fourteen years old, and I have just recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed...
View ArticleChapter Two: Opening Pandora’s Box
Soon after awakening to my crisis of ‘self’, I was sent to my first therapist. My social circles had changed, and I’d begun to spend time with a more marginalized and less straight and narrow group of...
View ArticleChapter One: Journeying Back to Self
This blog is an attempt to make sense of what brought me into the world of psychiatry as a child and of where it would take me for the next fourteen years. It is an effort to document where I go from...
View ArticleAnnouncing Mad in America’s New Resource Section on Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal
In yesterday's newsletter, I announced the arrival of two new resources at Mad in America: a section on psychiatric drugs managed by Robert Whitaker, and one on psychiatric drug withdrawal, which I’ll...
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Reflections on MIA’s Film Festival and Our Collective Human Future
Three weeks have passed since Mad in America’s International Film Festival took place at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, Massachusetts, USA. I’ve been spending a lot of time in solitude, reflecting...
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‘To Gift the Mind To Chemistry’, and To Take It Back: Dylan Tighe To Headline...
As I scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed one afternoon this past January, I stumbled upon Dylan Tighe, an actor, writer, musician, and director from Dublin, Ireland. I can’t remember how—perhaps...
View ArticleOn Waking Up From the “American Dream”
“These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds...
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Reflections on a Pathologized Adolescence and a Vision For The Future
I’ve been working on a larger writing project for a while now, and am currently focusing on my ninth grade year— the year I turned fourteen, the year I began to think about suicide, the year I...
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Tickets, Updates, and More on MIA’s International Film Festival
The summer is fast approaching, which means fall is on its heels. In Massachusetts, this change will be manifest in the beautiful skyline shift from green to orange, red, and yellow. It will be...
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