Like every woman in this culture, I’m surrounded by images telling me what is beautiful and healthy. From supermarket magazine covers, to Hollywood starlets, even to the women anchors who deliver serious news and analysis, the unanimous Message is that you will only be successful, attractive, popular and in charge of your life if you’re thin or fit the typical women’s self-image.
While being overweight and obese do put you at greater risk for lifestyle illnesses (though there is still debate about whether being slightly overweight really does carry danger), the types of images we see
Continue reading Psych med weight gain and women’s self-image
After I experienced a lot of psych med weight gain, I realized how I’ve been seeing myself and other women.
I’ve been looking at myself, I’ve been looking at other women, everywhere – on buses, in the streets, restaurants, stores, cinemas, you name it – and thinking that the thinner ones were prettier than me, more advantaged than me, and what’s more – on some level I am ashamed to admit I’ve sunk to – looking at the women bigger than me, and secretly congratulatiing myself and stroking my ego because I had a smaller body! But that was before
Continue reading How psych med weight gain taught me to stop objectifying women
Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can create profound and lasting changes, or humiliate and destroy us. But they only have that power if we can feel.
A person with frozen emotions is not moved by language. She hears the words, but they float around somewhere “out there”. Syllables strung together, hardly meaningful. Syllables like stones bouncing off a lake.
The closed self is like a lake covered in hardened steel. Below the cold metal, nothing is alive, because nothing can breathe. The deep soul within becomes static. Locked in a cavern of darkness, unmoved, unmovable.
I have been this
Continue reading How I Overcame Frozen Emotions, and Re-Connected With Myself
Having fun being with me
Until recently, I could lose myself in the Internet, but I ddn’t feel like it. I could flip my screen to another window, glance at lines of text, pretend to read, and get into a mode where I learn and absorb nothing, only a sense of urgency and overwhelm.
I don’t think human beings evolved to represent our thoughts in multiple words and paragraphs at the drop of a hat. Maybe this technology allows us to say more than we can truly establish for ourselves. Maybe I can’t just conjure up a representation of
Continue reading By Hannah – Slowing Down and Being With Me
Questioning psych meds
If you believe the public education campaigns, the only problem facing people with “mental illness” is the “stigma” which stops them from seeking help.
The answer, apparently, is to get as many people as possible to believe the brain disease theory. Treatment “works”, we are told.
People Believe in Their Psych Meds
The people that are held up as examples, a shining light for everyone labeled with “mental illness,” all support this model. They proclaim that they “got sick,” found the right medications and psychotherapy, and are now in “recovery.” And the system – the
Continue reading Where is the Frank Discussion of the Effects of Psych Meds?
Computers became the focus of my unbalanced life
My unbalanced life led to isolation, despair, and what some might call classic signs of “clinical depression.” But it wasn’t until years later that I had any contact with the mental health system – after I’d become desperate enough to crack in a highly visible way. I went on a journey to try to renew my spirit, ended up considered “manic” and “psychotic,” and was thrown into the hospital. At that point, doctors and nurses tried to sell me on the idea that I had a biological illness. No one ever suggested
Continue reading An Unbalanced Life Led to Isolation, Stagnation, Despair, and a Diagnosis
Personal Responsibility
Often, we hear that some people believe “mental illness” is just an excuse for bad behavior. Well-meaning advocates say that attitudes such as these are one reason why we need more mental health “literacy.
Mental illnesses, we are told, are biological conditions for which the “sufferer” has no moral culpability, as capricious as diabetes or heart disease.
A more enlightened attitude to those exhibiting behaviors that are disturbing is to view them as biologically ill and in need of treatment, rather than human beings making the wrong choices.
Mental Illness Excused Us from Personal Responsibility
Take, for
Continue reading By Hannah – “Mental Illness” Systems Subvert Personal Responsibility and Morality
Look twice at the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Mental Health Awareness Week. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) runs awareness campaigns just like this every year, with financial support from Big Pharma. The educational message of both is that depression, schizophrenica, and bipolar are treatable medical conditions — brain diseases –and getting “help” is a good thing. The public seems to believe, almost unanimously, thanks to “awareness” campaigns like these, that “mental illnesses” are brain diseases. The Brain Disease Theory Ruins Lives
Laura Delano: Damaged by Diagnosis of a Brain Disease
Listen to this speech by Laura
Continue reading By Hannah – The Brain Disease Theory of Mental Illness is a Human Rights Issue
(Editor’s Note: The writer lives in Canada, and is writing from her experience with their government-funded “single-payer” health system. Many Canadians like their system and can’t understand the U.S. system of “the best health care a person’s money can buy.”
Many in the United States, who favor health insurance reform, feel single-payer health care, where individual practitioners, clinics, and hospitals would be paid by the government, would be better. Some Canadians and Britons, who have single-payer health care, aren’t so sure.)
What Would TV's Marcus Welby, MD, Think of Single-Payer Health Care?
I figure this is heresy, but I’m
Continue reading By “Hannah” – Single-Payer Health Care System Limits Patient Choice and Outcomes
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