A significant number of people diagnosed with mental illness have psychic abilities not yet under control. They may have true mental illness as well, including faulty neurological wiring and chemical imbalance. However, some people have...

Now his work-mates pitied him, although they tried not to show it, and it was generally arranged that he was given jobs which allowed him to work alone. The smell of ink, and the steady...

behind the scenes.” Ironically, such efforts purport to cure some dissociative phenomena by encouraging others, such as Dissociative Amnesia.

A child’s death isn’t always necessary for a mother to grieve.

We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories...

If you can still wipe your own backside then life’s not that bad!

But Hey, Guess What Crazy means I’m not liablefor my actions. So screw it, I’ll go home, propped up on Prozac against distractions

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

It is my understanding that when you receive a Autism diagnosis for your child you have to accept it. If you don’t you are only condemning yourself and your child to a life of frustrating...

I want to talk about the difference between living and existing, and what it was like to be kept on an acute psychiatric ward for day after day after day after day after day after...

me.”As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

An inner ease spreads inside me. Such is the power of acceptance and understanding from other people, the power of validation

Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to...

In the terms of ‘Mental Illness’ Isn’t stable a place they put horses that wish to run free?

When he first said my diagnosis, I couldn’t believe it. There must be another PTSD than post-traumatic stress disorder, I thought. I have only heard of war veterans who have served on the front lines...

Blame is a Defense Against PowerlessnessBetrayal trauma changes you. You have endured a life-altering shock, and are likely living with PTSD symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks and bewilderment—with broken trust, with the inability to cope with many...

Pictures … flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.

A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often...

Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.

They’re the perfect loving fam’ly, so adoring…And I love them ev’ry day of ev’ry week.So my son’s a little shit, my husband’s boring,And my daughter, though a genius, is a freak.

I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave,...

Cheryl was aided in her search by the Internet. Each time she remembered a name that seemed to be important in her life, she tried to look up that person on the World Wide Web....

Guidance counselors always love to say, ‘Just think positively,’ but that’s impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster. My body is an efficient happy-though-killing machine.

When I was a little girl everyone made fun of me and calling me awful names.Also saying i’m ugly and now i’m starting to believe it,because I can’t seem to find a man that wants...

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were...

Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.

A string of thoughts run through my head like a song I can’t get rid of, over and over in the same order: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.

I couldn’t trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified, if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of BPD? I found myself fiercely guarding and limiting my emotional reactions, chastising...

Genius by birth, Bipolar by design

The problem with having problems is that ‘someone’ always has it worse.

News came of Beni Beni, the madman of Wimbe, who’d always made us laugh in better times. He’d run up to merchants in the trading center with his raving eyes and snatch cakes and Fantas...

Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream...

PART 2 I felt doomed to death,But in a flash, Before I could reduce my thoughts To an emotion, I felt a mass leave my body:Departing. Then my mind becomes anonymous As is each night....

The pain will always be in you — but you will not always be in pain.

We don’t go in for that psychodynamic stuff around here. Those guys will talk you to death, clean out your bank account while they are doing it, and then invite you to come back and...

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

So ask me if I am alright.’I’m fine; I’m always fine.’You see this look in my eyes.’No, I’m fine. I am always fine.’There is a corpse behind my smile.’Listen, I am fine. Always, always fine...

Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.And that’s why Mom is always so afraid. If we don’t know what made...

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

I can’t describe the feeling when I go down – it’s down down down and there’s never going to be an up again. And whatever was good isn’t good any more; white becomes grey, music...

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When...

It’s so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

There are such things as delusions, but not every unlikely vision that the mentally ill have is imaginary.

Mental illness is not in the business of making sense of itself.

The fault in our stars is the inability to see that the world falls in love with fantasy, fairytales and magic in movies. Even religion asks us to believe in the most unlikely of situations....

I was lost in a void of perpetual darkness. Disconnected from myself. Turned inside out. No sign of life. Eventually, the darkness was my light and the void a haven – a quiet place where...

Janna knew – Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn’t make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West,...

Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill...

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival....