Religions are popular in psych wards, especially religions with self-stylized heavens. Patients make suicide appeal this way.

Suicide ends for some patients so others call survival a feat – teamwork.

Psych ward clocks, depressed, nudge like anxious calendars.

Ogarnęło go poczucie beznadziejności – beznadziejności oswojonej i ciepłej, przez co jeszcze bardziej beznadziejnej. Zatrzymał się przy oknie. Ścieżka ginęła w jesiennym dywanie opadłych liści i w mroku: była tak blisko i zarazem tak daleko,...

My mother’s outh drops. ‘Emmy…don’t say those things Emmy. Remember, we don’t talk about those things.”Yes Mom. I remember. That’s why I’m here, looking like this.’An orderly knocks on the door and announces that visiting...

The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can’t stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can’t stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.At...

He said that I have to remember that even though I’ve changed a lot in here, I’m going back to a world that hasn’t changed

It’s an unfortunate word, ‘depression’, because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It’s when your old personality has left town...

He’ll have to do without me, Jamie thought, not looking back. And then clearly, as if he’d been told, he knew Grenville /could/ do without him. There was somewhere else he had to go now,...

It goes so fast, he thought, they don’t tell you that, how fast it goes…

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation,...

Right there in that room, listening to the tape Laura gave me, I decided that I wanted something more than what I’d allowed myself to become. Listening to the voices and piano notes fade in...

Eventually I had gotten it together enough to call her. I did so partly to let her know where I was and partly to almost brag about where I was. Whenever I’d get morose, sulky,...