A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
I got thinking about this a while back when reading a post by MJ about being put in a seclusion room while on a psych ward as a teenager. While seclusion is sometimes necessary for safety, I think serenity-promoting spaces could be more useful, at least in some cases. In my last nursing job, which… Continue reading Creating Serenity-Promoting Spaces for Mental Health
Now is a far better time to be mentally ill than it was a few hundred years ago. Institutions like the infamous Bedlam were not happy places, and you might just find yourself chained to the wall for years on end. James Norris at Bedlam, circa 1814 In the 1800s, you may have ended up… Continue reading The Downside of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization
But Deliver Me From Crazy by Katie R. Dale is a memoir of living with bipolar disorder. You may know Katie from her blog, and she also contributed a story about bipolar I to my book Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis. The book begins when Katie was in high school, when her illness first appears.… Continue reading Book Review: But Deliver Me From Crazy
Mental illness is fairly unique in that laws allow for treatment to be imposed involuntarily. I'm not against involuntary psychiatric treatment entirely, and it can play an important role, but there are some things that can and should be done better. When involuntary treatment is necessary Working as a nurse in community mental health, there… Continue reading The Problem with Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment
My Beautiful Psychosis by Emma Goude is a gripping, up close and personal look at what it's actually like to experience psychosis. The author's honesty and complete openness quickly shatter any stereotypes of psychosis being frightening and dangerous. The book begins with the events leading up to the author's first episode of psychosis. When she… Continue reading Book Review: My Beautiful Psychosis
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang gives insights into her life with schizoaffective disorder and some of the major issues she's faced as a result. Want uses the term schizophrenias to refer to primary psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Her initial diagnosis was bipolar disorder, and it took 9 years to… Continue reading Book Review: The Collected Schizophrenias
As a person with depression, being open and honest with treatment providers is likely to go straight out the window if it appears to conflict with whatever goal feels most pressing to me at the time.
I stumbled across this gem courtesy of Kate et al. of Colour of Madness. It lists reasons people were admitted to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia in its first 25 years of existence, from 1864 to 1889. The building is still around, but now it's a museum/ghost tour operation. Trans-Allegheny "diagnoses" There… Continue reading What Made You Lunatic Asylum-Level Crazy in 1864?
Public domain This post is a follow-up of sorts to a guest post I did recently on Renard's World. While that post focused on the dark side of psychiatry in the 1900s, in this post we'll look even further back in history at some of the frightening goings-on in early asylums to "treat" people with… Continue reading Early Insane Asylums: Bedlam and Beyond
In this emerging blogger post, Noose Girl of Breathing With a Noose writes about an ambulance joy ride in the context of bipolar mania. Entrance and intake processing is finally complete. Before the doctor moves me from the emergency room to the next phase of my visit, he bestows the knowledge that I may have bipolar… Continue reading Ambulance Joy Ride (Guest Post)