Personal Stories

For many caregivers who assist their loved ones, the journey involves navigating the medical system and its many challenges. This time, the journey takes...

There was a time when I could think of nothing else but pills and prescriptions, pain and panic. Psychiatry shrank my world.

If I would have read a story like this before I entered into psychedelic-assisted therapy, I would have been more careful, which might have prevented a lot of unnecessary hurt.

Dr. W.’s description of me, that I was agitated, insulting, uncooperative, did not match the emotions I was feeling. I felt distraught, hopeless, terrified, and desperate.

The problem of staff brutality towards patients on the psych wards disproportionately affects people of color and continues to happen every day behind locked doors.

Disposable toothbrushes and sporks. Crayons instead of pens. Little pills in little paper cups. Someone would come. Someone would go. The days turned into nights and back again.

My guardian decided to seek out “professional” advice about how to diminish my “outbursts.” I was perceived as a problem that needed to be extinguished into a compliant state.

Western psychiatry has done a lot of harm to people, especially when it is forced upon people as their “only” option. People’s experiences are wildly diverse, and only a diversity of options can do justice to our differing needs.

The Detroit Free Press did an excellent job in bringing to light the conditions at Pontiac, its loss of accreditation, and closing. Still, they didn't quite grasp the severity of violence there.

Even though I was only on the medication for a little over six months, I am still traveling down the long road of psychiatric drug withdrawal. This is the hardest thing I have ever endured.

Medication support groups are saving lives and brains because doctors do not know how to safely taper off psych meds.

My will had been broken by work and psychiatry. How could I get my self-power back after so many years and so many brain-damaging meds?

I had a chemical brain injury from medications. The only help doctors could offer was more medications: treating the failed treatment with other dangerous treatments.

From an early age, relatives and doctors alike had told me I was severely mentally ill. Naturally, I believed them.

If you don't realize that you are autistic, your intellectual, sensory, social, and emotional differences are a mystery, even to you.

The suicidality that accompanies akathisia is the natural human impulse to escape being tortured. To save my wife, the woman I love, I was forced to argue for her continued torture.

I wanted to explore how time and sequence work when memory is disrupted, in my case due to traumatic brain injury. I needed to document and reclaim my own sensorium.

This was no illness. And I knew my biochemistry was not the primary issue. I chose to call it a severe stress breakdown.

Since many psych patients become forced consumers, their advocates have a duty to be educated and concerned with adverse reactions.

Finally, I realized that my schizophrenia was not a disorder, but a very complex problem that I could solve by myself.

My own experiences have shown that specific exercises can help me to recognize the early symptoms of psychosis even earlier and more subtly, and reduce their intensity — even the delusions!

During my 2003 episode I received a series of ten shocks and at first they seemed to “magically” cure me. However, it only took a month for me to go back to feeling depressed and suicidal — again.

The psychiatrists broke my body and my brain and now they are washing their hands of me. When I think about what has been done to me and what has been taken from me, I can barely breathe.

It is possible to prevent and alleviate both depression and mania by managing the timing and intensity of exposure to light (and dark). I wasn’t sure these measures would work for me, but they did.

You are trained to trust a system, to trust a professional… But I was always following my intuitive self telling me that there was a way out of the madness and the labels.