Medicating the muse
Read on for a self-indulgent blather about mental illness, medication, creativity, and a little bit of self pity. Or don’t. Whatever. Potentially triggery for bipolar II.
...read moreI was the girl who thought bulimia sounded like a great idea.
[Trigger warning for eating disorders]
For most of my youth, my exposure to eating disorders had been pretty much limited to Lifetime-style movies where the pretty young woman desperately wants to join the cheerleading squad and starts exercising all the time and throwing up her food, and everyone compliments her on losing weight, except for her abandoned former best friend, who is the only one who can tell that Something Is Very Wrong, and eventually she collapses at school, and then there’s inpatient treatment and a roommate who’s been Doing This For Years, blah blah blah meaningful self-discovery, blah blah happy ending, blah blah ED hotline blah.
...read moreChildbirth can be as stressful as war
Post-childbirth PTSD is as common as post-partum depression, but we don’t talk about it. As many as 1 in 13 mothers experiences PTSD. PTSD is more common in women who are survivors of sexual abuse, and women who have traumatic births.
...read moreOn Falling Apart
You should definitely read this essay about being involuntarily committed and diagnosed with a mental illness. It is actually significantly more uplifting than that makes it sound.
...read morePregnancy Blues: Why Aren’t We Talking About Pre-Natal Depression?
Feministe friend Jessica Grose has an important series up at Slate on prenatal depression, its pervasiveness, and the stigma still attached to it (Part 1 is here; you can click through at the bottom of the piece to read parts two and three). After detailing her own experiences with depression during her pregnancy, Grose looks at the utter dearth of conversation (and certainly empathy) for women who are pregnant and clinically depressed. She writes:
...read moreOwning my food crazy
Trigger warning for discussion of dieting and food restriction. I have a confession to make. Over the last six months or so, I’ve lost a significant amount of weight. It’s my first time that my weight has gone down since I jumped on board the fat acceptance train, and I feel great. I have more [...]
...read moreMillennials and Economic Justice
I’m a millennial. I’m a recent college graduate—no matter how much more established colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties say, “I know how hard it is to be a recent grad” or an MSNBC (or any other news network) panel of non-millennials (read: older white dudes who seem to be the sole media [...]
...read moreOur Failed Mental Health System
This article in the New York Times Magazine is a must-read. It looks at the many ways our system is failing the mentally ill and their families — how there are few good options, and mentally ill people end up being cruelly cycled through emergency rooms and jails while their families hit wall after wall in trying to get help. I wish the author would have focused a bit more on the civil liberties issues — there are bars to involuntary commitment for good reasons — but the current set-up isn’t doing much good.
...read moreThe Toll of FAAB on FAAB Childhood Sexual Abuse
This is a highly subjective account of my experience with FAAB on FAAB childhood sexual abuse. Trigger warning for detailed account of abuse. In addition, I want to emphasize that this piece is explicitly about *my* process, and I will be focusing on outlining the difficulties I encountered in my recovery, and discussing what I believe could have helped me heal more quickly and fully.
...read moreBeing an Advocate and an Ally
One of the discussions that I’ve seen pop up on Feministe a lot lately has been the question of how one can be an ally or an advocate without crossing the line into paternalism or playing savior. When it comes to madness or special education, I feel that the best way to be an ally is to be educated. The problems with how we see madness are so deeply rooted that, in my opinion, the only way to really start changing the way we think is by actively challenging the ways in which we experience madness as a concept and mad persons as individuals.
...read moreBloodied Yet Unbowed
As some of you might know I’ve had the dubious privilege of sitting on a lot of different sides of the educational world. When I was very young I was given a series of trendy diagnoses and pumped full of drugs that made me sick, when they didn’t work I attended was sentenced to survived several behaviorally-based programs for children with severe behavioral, emotional, and learning disabilities. These were the kinds of schools where “reasonable goals” were about as ambitious as eventual independent living and a closely supervised service job.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
Years of anti-gay bullying, teachers afraid to confront students for calling other students faggots because of a policy against supporting “gay lifestyles,” and a school district too cowardly to confront Evangelical political interests lead to a rash of teen suicides in Minnesota. Whats this got to do with madness and diagnosis? Well, as it turns out, the story includes two very good illustrations of the ways in which certain assumptions about madness serve to privilege certain interpretations of an event.
...read more
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