Chapter Fourteen: Crossing the Threshold
Although the drive to the psychiatric hospital in White Plains, New York, in September 2004 was a mere fifteen minutes from home, the trip felt like a time warp, like I was leaving the orbit of reality...
View ArticleChapter Fifteen: A Haven from Self
A Note to the Reader: Thorough searches of my memory reserves have failed to provide me with a complete and detailed account of my first inpatient stay on a locked unit in Westchester County, New York...
View ArticleChapter Sixteen: Inside a House of Cards
Dazed and confused, I was discharged from ‘The Haven’ in September of 2004 and entered an intensive outpatient day program (IOP) on the grounds of the same hospital. Before entering the hospital, I had...
View ArticleChapter Seventeen: Commencing to Self-Destruct
While my fellow ‘Class of 2006’ graduates celebrated with embraces and high-fives on Commencement Day, jumping excitedly into group photos with caps and gowns, sunglasses, cigars, and a giddy...
View ArticleChapter Eighteen: Sentenced to Life
A few weeks after my college graduation in the summer of 2006, my five-year high school reunion was upon me. I had expended a tremendous amount of emotional energy convincing myself to feel excited...
View ArticleChapter Nineteen: Playing the Part
In the months following my five-year high school reunion in the summer of 2006, I drifted about in a sea of indistinguishable days. Amidst this aimlessness, I somehow managed to find myself in a...
View ArticleChapter Twenty: Russian Roulette
After I left my research position on the acute inpatient psychiatric unit of a Boston hospital towards the end of 2006, my life started a two-year spiral downwards into the depths of a darkness unlike...
View ArticleChapter Twenty-One: Countdown to Surrender
COUNTDOWN- THREE DAYS It is mid-morning on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008. I am staring at a computer screen in my cubicle, one among many at my current place of employment, a small state agency in...
View ArticleChapter Twenty-Two: To the Hospital on the Hill
Bright, white light pours into my eyes, which have opened themselves slowly. I clench them closed again, hoping to push the light out. For a brief second, I wonder if I’ve just woken up at the beach...
View ArticleChapter Twenty-Three: On the Locked Unit, Locked in Myself
As we made our way out of Boston and to the psychiatric hospital on the hill, I watched the ‘normal’ world— the world beyond the Plexiglas rear window of the ambulance I was strapped into— drift past...
View ArticleChapter Twenty-Four: Off the Meds and Out of My Mind
During my first few days on the locked psychiatric unit of the hospital on the hill in early December 2008, I counted the passing minutes mostly from my hospital bed, incapable of eating or drinking....
View ArticleChapter Twenty-Five: “Paranoid Android”
It is Christmas Eve of 2008. I am leaning against the kitchen counter of an old friend’s house, arms tucked tightly across my stomach, as I observe crowds of people from my past, bottles of beer in...
View ArticleChapter Twenty-Six: Reaching the End, and Making a Start
A deep blue blanketing of 1AM sky envelops my car as I sit in my parents’ driveway in February 2010, pondering my next, last move. I have just driven home in a blur from someone’s house after a...
View ArticleOn Recovering from Psychiatric Labels and Psychotropic Medications: An...
To Readers: I’ve decided to sway, briefly, from my traditional story-telling style on this blog in order to post my short speech from this weekend’s ‘Occupy APA’ event in Philadelphia. —— It is an...
View ArticleChapter Twenty-Seven: Reignition
Silent hours unfolded as I devoured the words, a symphonic consciousness crescendoing as door after door of new awareness opened inside of me. It was May, 2010, and I was alone in a Vermont hotel...
View ArticleLaunching the Beyond ‘Anatomy’ Forum
When I first read Anatomy of an Epidemic in 2010, something inside of me ignited. I had no idea that such a sensation was possible to experience, let alone for someone like me, who hadn’t felt alive...
View ArticleFighting for Our Most Basic of Human Rights– The Right to be Human
I write this from New York City, where well over a hundred people united in solidarity today to protest the American Psychiatric Association and to demand human rights for those in the mental health...
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The United Met States of Psychiatry
Dr. William F. McLaughlin Building, Metropolitan State Hospital, October 2012 About two weeks ago, I stood in silence to watch nature’s fiery colors make a beautiful and desperate attempt to engulf...
View ArticleInvoluntarily Voluntary
If I was to sum up my career as a “Bipolar” patient, the word voluntary stands out to me more than most. Indeed, it’s scribbled and typed all over the thousand and some odd pages of my psychiatric...
View ArticleA Challenge to “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”
A reaction to Liza Long’s article from the Huffington Post Online, December 16th, 2012. ‘I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother’: A Mom’s Perspective On The Mental Illness Conversation in America As I write these...
View ArticleFree from Harm? Reflecting on the Dangers of the White House’s Proposed ‘Now...
“And so what we should be thinking about is our responsibility to care for [our children] and shield them from harm and give them the tools they need to grow up and do everything that they’re capable...
View ArticleReflections on a Psychiatric Indoctrination, or, How I Began to Free Myself...
(dictionary.com) Cult, n. a particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, especially as...
View ArticleLife, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness? Protesting the Legislation of...
On March 26th, a small group of us gathered outside the State House in Boston, Massachusetts, to rally and protest against several oppressive, dehumanizing, and dangerous bills put forth by the House...
View ArticleFinding the Meaning in Suffering: My Experience with Coming off Psychiatric...
For the last month or so, Mad in America has been hard at work building a directory of “mental health” providers across North America (and eventually, we hope, the world) who will work with people...
View Article“Mental Illness”, the DSM-5, and Dreams for a Post-Psychiatry World
If, a little over three years ago, you asked me who I was, my one and only answer would have been, “Bipolar.” It was the word that defined me, that explained my emotions and behaviors, that gave me...
View ArticleReflections on the New Mad in America Withdrawal Directory and the “Mental...
Earlier today, Matthew Cohen announced the launch of Mad in America’s directory of providers who support psychiatric drug withdrawal. Many thanks to him for his hard work building the technology...
View ArticleOn the Urge to Take My Life, and My Decision to Take It Back From the “Mental...
Tomorrow, September 10th, is World Suicide Prevention Day. According to Wikipedia, its mission is “to provide worldwide commitment and action to prevent suicides, with various activities around the...
View ArticlePsychiatric Drug Withdrawal and Human Metamorphosis
I write this from my family’s sunroom looking out over the distant Maine ocean, its deep blue color ablaze with specks of gold from the November sun. I’m watching the waves roll in, one after the...
View ArticleMark Your Calendars— Announcing Mad in America’s First International Film...
I’ve come to believe in the power of film not only to educate and spark dialogue, but also to catalyze personal transformation, as well as transformation of the sociopolitical landscape. Indeed, just...
View ArticleI Am Alive
Of the many reasons I’ll be in New York City this weekend to protest the American Psychiatric Association is this: I am alive. Today, I feel this aliveness on the bottoms of my feet as they rest on the...
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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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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...
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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‘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...
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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...
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...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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...
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