As a therapist, I have many avenues in which to learn about DID, but I hear exactly the opposite from clients and others who are struggling to understand their own existence. When I talk to...

It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep...

Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn’t want.

Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through...

We need this help from the outside because we don’t know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit—a chasm really—when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves,...

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has...

The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn’t like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn’t know...

For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he...

It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling...

Take it from me, that kind of torment causes you to retreat to a place in your mind where you are so strong that nothing and no one can bother you. Or so you think!...

Every age gets the lunatics it deserves.

Today I am a lens, a pen, a gun.”–p. 1 …Before My Eyes…look for it on 2.11.14

My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it’s...

I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its...

Psychiatric diagnoses are considered to be technical and bounded; you are either in or out. In contrast, a biblical perspective puts many interpersonal differences on a continuum: people may have more or less of something....

Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life...

Breathe. Relax. This too shall pass.

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears; gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy...

Brenda, do you know God loves you? He really does. To Him, you’re perfect, absolutely perfect. You always have been.

Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees.

I’ve got to that point in life when there’s very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there’s one thing about...

Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race.

It has been said of dreams that they are a ‘controlled psychosis,’ or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

The process of reforming the mental health system never includes the complaints that families and caregivers have regarding a need for increased access to resources, treatment, education, and financial support. Reform has continued to ignore...

Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment.

I am not manic-just happy. It has been such a long time since I was happy. Please join me on my magic carpet for now.

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after...

Mental illness” is among the most stigmatized of categories.’ People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.

Intellegence is a disease

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than...

Public stigmaStereotypeNegative belief about a group (e.g., dangerousness, incompetence, character weakness)PrejudiceAgreement with belief and/or negative emotional reaction (e.g., anger, fear)DiscriminationBehavior response to prejudice (e.g., avoidance, withhold employment and housing opportunities, withhold help)Self-stigmaStereotypeNegative belief about the...

Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.

Certainly, it’s important to acknowledge and identify the effects of BPD on your life. It’s equally important to realize that it neither dictates who you are nor fixes your destiny.

To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha’s life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He...

The voices in my head that tell the other voices what to do are mean.

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes...

So, what role does memory play in the understanding and treatment of trauma? There is a form of implicit memory that is profoundly unconscious and forms the basis for the imprint trauma leaves on the...

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the...

While binge drinking is a significant issue, it is likely that many members of the public would be surprised by its categorisation as a mental illness, particularly at the milder end.”Public confusion caused by differing...

The distinction between diseases of “brain” and “mind,” between “neurological” problems and “psychological” or “psychiatric” ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between...

Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven’t touched a drop of...

Someday, I dream we will medically address mental illness in a way that helps people WITHOUT completely crippling them, creatively or robbing them of their precious sensitivity. No one wants to live life feeling like...

DID is about survival! As more people begin to appreciate this concept, individuals with DID will start to feel less as though they have to hide in shame. DID develops as a response to extreme...

The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial

Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while.

People are screwed up in this world. I’d rather be with someone screwed and open about it than somebody perfect and…you know… ready to explode.

I need them to be aware and present with me in the midst of the storm, not just tell me what to do.

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.

We are Craiglockhart’s success stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think – at least beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard...