Three years ago, when I FINALLY got some psychiatric help for an episode that was already almost a year old at that point (thanks for nothing), my then-psychiatrist diagnosed me with panic disorder/agoraphobia, OCD, Borderline Personality Disorder, depressive disorder, dissociative disorder, and Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. Believe it or not, I was okay with that. It gave me something to hold onto, because I couldn’t make sense out of what was happening to me anymore. By the time I got in to see him, it was already too late. The damage was done. I will never fully recover. It’s not pessimism, just plain fact. Too much has happened to me, and rearranged my brain and how I perceive things.
hope Archive
07 Jan 2013
My Experience with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Lily)
Trigger Warning: Self-Harm, Abuse, Rape, Human Trafficking
I’ve been half-aware that I’m multiple since about the age of fourteen, when I started to realise that it really wasn’t usual for people to experience severe blackouts and time loss and memory issues (lasting hours, days, weeks, months and even years); that it wasn’t usual for people to so routinely and constantly be addressed by a completely different name by strangers who will insist that you have met them and that your name is something else; that it wasn’t usual for moods and personalities and tastes to change so drastically and so constantly. I had no word for what I was experiencing; I had no knowledge and no understanding and after about a year of being so, so aware of this I finally told my (then) therapist about those experiences. The result? A long lecture about self-diagnosis and “making up more lies to make my supposed PTSD more believable” followed by being asked about where I had researched Dissociative Identity Disorder and that I did know that it was made up and not real and that nobody would ever believe me. So, for almost ten years I hid it except from a very close friend online and one of my partners (he lived with me so it was very difficult to hide).
09 Aug 2012
Group Therapy – Panic and Anxiety, Session 1
Trigger Warning: mention of rape, sexual assault
This is the first of an 8 week series reviewing panic and anxiety from a group therapy point of view. It is based on the group therapy services available through Langley Memorial Hospital. Feel free to follow along and answer the questions posted in each section.
Session 1: Exploring Anxiety Disorders
01 Aug 2012
My Experience With Recovery (Breyonne)
Seven years ago I got tired of living my life the way I was. I couldn’t stop drinking, smoking, eating or doing drugs. I was sick constantly. I was living in harmful situations with toxic people, and each and every day was exactly the same. My only respite was to go out and get loaded again.
12 Dec 2011
Homophobia and Other Bullshit
Most of us can recognize homophobia in everyday life in certain situations: derogatory remarks, violence in newspapers, magazines, and headlines, perhaps something that has been done to us personally, like bullying, loss of a job, friends, family, or exile from communities and homes. In a lot of these cases, it is pretty clear what is happening and why. But when some of this stuff happens as a child, or can have another context put to it that makes the lines a little blurry, it’s more difficult to separate fact from fiction, and to identify behaviors and incidents for what they really are.
13 Oct 2011
The Undying Message of Poetry
Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. -Sylvia Plath Poetry has always resonated within the mental health community. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that so many poets share the same illnesses that plague us, depression, mania, split personalities. For me, the words of Robert Frost and […]
26 Sep 2011
My Experience with Depression (Faye)
I’ve been struggling with depression for as long as I can remember – I was abused by a family member as a child and that left me emotionally scarred. When my parents divorced, it only got worse until said family member moved away. Things just seemed to pile on and on and when I was 13 I began the struggle with self harm, cutting and scratching myself.
06 Jun 2011
From Darkness To Daylight
It’s the little things that bring meaning to life. I will never forget that morning. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I couldn’t believe I lived through that. What happened? Why did I chicken out? It felt like there was nothing left of me.… It was just before 9 a.m. I decided to pick […]