Personal Stories Archive

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Stormy Skies Ahead!

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My experience in the mental hospital

Trigger warning: Involuntary restraint, abuse from hospital staff.

I was passing by an elderly man in a wheelchair, and he grabbed at my arm. I shook my arm free and pulled away from him. All of a sudden, two nurses and a tech were yelling at me, telling me to go to my room or sit down. Admittedly, after they said that, I became quite defiant, but not a danger or threat to myself or others.

Lost Contact

Imagine never being alone, and still being lonely. Its just as empty in my chest as it is full in my house. Always people coming and going. Talking, yelling, laughter. Noise, it has just become noise to me.

Trauma is Trauma

Trigger Warning: graphic description of psychotic episode, violence

Does it change your view to know that I live with schizophrenia, and when the police came, there was no evidence anyone had broken in, no blood, no man? That’s where it gets tough. This experience, and other similarly intense experiences, are discounted because the general population doesn’t see them as ‘real’.

My Thoughts on Guns as a Mentally Ill Person

Trigger Warning: Descriptions of violence, mentions of suicide and gun use.

As I watch mass shooting after mass shooting play out on CNN and Obama’s recent town hall on guns, the same themes play out over and over. The mentally ill are consistently blamed for gun violence as a convenient scapegoat to avoid facing the real culprit for gun violence: toxic masculinity and the sheer ease and availability of gun ownership in America.

On Life, Death, and Fatness

The thing of it is, my sister’s death has taught me that fat shaming from the outside world is, astoundingly, the very least of my problems, even though it affects my friendships, relationships, the quality of care I receive on literally any platform, and my chances of getting things like jobs and housing, regardless of my references and qualifications. I have been realizing in the past year and a bit that the worst damage is the damage I now do to myself: internalized fat phobia.

My Experience With The American Education System (Or, The Importance of Education for Disabled People)

I was fourteen years old, just out of the mental hospital. My mom and I had tried to get me enrolled in public high school, but they expelled me for “truancy” before I was even enrolled. I would find out later that this required a sort of trial that… Never. Fucking. Happened.

Femme Bisexual Invisibility and Passing

I am a femme cisgender bisexual with invisible psychiatric disabilities. While I date a man I pass as straight. While my disabilities hide out in my brain I pass as non-disabled. With a migrant worker grandmother and a caucasian father, I am a white-passing Latina. This precarious intersectional identity allows me all of the goodies of straight cis white privilege while alienating me from activist solidarity. Trump would have me deported. Jeb condemns my former marriage. I am between worlds.

On “Family Values” and Mental Health

Family values is problematic, both on the right, and the left. Why? The simple answer is that it renders worthless the value of anyone who isn’t (heterosexual and) married with children. By placing families on that pedestal, it leaves everyone else at the bottom. The obvious demographic groups affected include those living in poverty, those who have addictions, people of colour, and single parents. But this also includes all working middle class (and even super-rich) who are single, who choose not to have children, or who choose not to marry.

Behavioral Health Unit at Kaiser

This minutiae that overwhelms the function of my brain combined with me as a person with a slight tendency towards obsessive compulsiveness equals my current predicament. Stir into this a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder and you have me at the junction of a mood change.