mental-health Archives

A Horse Brought Me Back To Life

April 26, 2019

By Sarah Van Sciver

As I exit my car I notice the unseasonable warmth on this early February day at the farm. I don my black and white wool Persian hat over the two braids in my hair but decide I can ditch my coat and get away with wearing my hooded, gray fleece. The welcomed warmth mirrors the inner thawing that has begun to occur within me during the past couple of weeks. The urge to keep painful emotions tamped down still remains but just as the winter clouds make way for the sun I, too, feel a small opening.

For the past five months, I have stayed committed to coming to a farm once a week where I have been participating in Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy, a type of therapy where horses play an essential role in healing trauma. Most of these days I’ve wanted to quit and run as far as I can to escape the frightening sensations that have finally begun to loosen their hold in my body. Like placing a healing salve on an open wound, the process has been painful; bringing to light what caused the pain in the first place.

Throughout the experience, bitter and painful as it’s been, I’ve come to realize that what I fear the most is also what I crave the most: touch and true connection. As if I had a blindfold over my eyes most of my life, I never realized the constant feelings of isolation, loneliness and disconnection I experienced were due to living with unprocessed and extensive trauma. Somehow through some kind of magic, the horses have brought me face to face with this pain while simultaneously healing the broken places inside of me. Continue Reading…

Autism, Guest Posts

Don’t Panic, I’m Only Autistic; or Welcome to Autism Acceptance Month

April 16, 2019

By Susanna Donato

Just over a year ago, on March 23, I was diagnosed with autism. By now, I’ve shared that information with many people in my life, including family, friends, and colleagues. Some of them, when I’ve explained, have said something along the lines of, “Oh! Yeah, you’re a little different, but I thought that was just a Susanna thing!”

Still, even though I don’t think “coming out” as autistic—sharing what’s essentially a medical diagnosis—is an obligation, I’m starting to feel a little lily-livered about posting resources and information and commenting on other people’s posts without sharing the reason I’m doing so or my perspective.

I’ve been reluctant to “go public” mainly because I don’t want people to judge me. When I told one friend, he took a step back and asked if I was OK.

I’m OK. I’m definitely OK. Autism isn’t contagious. It isn’t a deteriorating condition. And there are so many people like me. While the stereotype of autism may still be a boy with verbal and/or intellectual challenges—and don’t get me wrong, those individuals absolutely are present and deserve the same rights as anyone!—half or more have IQs that are average to above average, sometimes way above average. (Though non-speaking doesn’t mean non-communicative.) Lots of us are women, and a bunch are nonbinary or identify in other ways. And all of us, God willing, grow up and become adults. Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts

When Depression Gets Too Heavy

November 5, 2018

CW: This essay discusses ideation and/or suicide. If you or someone you know needs immediate help, please call 911. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at: 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741. The world needs you.

By Kari O’Driscoll

There’s a reason darkness is used as a metaphor for depression. In my worst moments, I felt as though there was a black spot in my head spreading like an oil spill, creeping outward, sinking in to the valleys and crevices of my brain and obliterating any possibility of light permeating. Perhaps the most shocking thing about it was how tired it made me. Never had I known that depression was so exhausting.

There is a television advertisement for an antidepressant medication whose tagline is “Depression Hurts.” The first time I saw it I felt right, like the ad writers had seen me in my natural habitat and sussed out something nobody else had noticed. I remember curling myself into a fetal position, rocking back and forth, feeling a weight and a soreness in my ribs – between them, an accordioning of my chest around my heart and lungs. My limbs ached as though I’d just climbed 4000 steps, my head hung low with fatigue. A fog settled over the top half of my brain that made focusing a chore. Depression was heavy. It was effort. It was draining, physically, mentally and spiritually. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health

Dots And Holes

August 21, 2018

By Avery Guess

Morse Code

Morse Code is made up of dots and dashes, or more accurately, dits and dahs, but I don’t know anyone who uses the latter. I never could listen to Morse Code and understand anything beyond the standard S.O.S., and even then, I’d worry that I hadn’t heard the message correctly. My first name, Avery, is made up of a total of 8 dots and 6 dashes. My last name, Guess, 10 dots and 3 dashes. Anxiety has 8 dots and 8 dashes. Depression contains a whopping 17 dots and only 8 dashes. Bipolar disorder, 27 dots and 16 dashes. Except in the case of anxiety, the dots prevail. There is no escaping them.

“Repetitive Vision”

I saw Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Room” titled “Repetitive Vision” in Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory in August 2014 while visiting Katie, a friend I’d met on Facebook a few years before. If I had heard of Yayoi Kusama prior to seeing her work that day, it was only in passing. Kusama is a Japanese artist who has been active since the 1950s. When she is not working in her studio in Japan or overseeing her popular installations, she lives in a mental hospital a couple of blocks away. She has experienced hallucinations from an early age that appear as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots.” When Katie and I walked into the room, and the door we entered through closed behind us, I experienced the exact opposite of claustrophobia. The walls and ceiling are made up of mirrors. The floor is white and scattered large neon coquelicot polka dots. These reddish-orangish dots also cover the three white mannequins with grey wigs who stand in various poses within the room. The effect the mirrors creates is that of infinite repetition. Katie and I stood amongst the mannequins and began imitating their poses, walked around the box we were inside trying to find an end, and took photos of ourselves within this magical environment. I could have stayed for hours. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health, Young Voices

The Day You Lose Your Mind

August 2, 2018

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GPYouAreEnough and on Facebook here.

By Jessica Young

It’s funny what they don’t tell you on the day you lose your mind.

Rhyme, reason, it all just dwindles away and you’re left with the bare bones…the soot.
The soot that is left is all of the debris you’ve left “for later”,
the “I can’t possibly handle this kind of emotional baggage” kind of debris.
The particles of dirt that gather at the base of your neck, weighing on your shoulders,
tangling up and knotting the muscle so you feel bogged down… weighed down… too heavy.

It’s funny what they don’t tell you on the day you lose your mind.

The weeks leading up to my Bipolar diagnosis were some of the most agonizing moments of my entire existence;
dissociations, delusions and absolutely no chance of sleep.
Sleep never comes.
You want it, you need it, you beg for it, but it just never comes.
The effects of sleeplessness on most people include many of the same effects for a person with Bipolar.
If you take that period of no sleep, combine it with some over the counter sleep medication
(twice the recommended dose because that’s all that seemed worked at the time),
combined with a prescription for Celexa (a drug that exacerbates the symptoms of Bipolar disorder)
and you get a recipe for a Manic disaster. Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts

This is not the end

July 8, 2018

By Tina Porter

In the Fall of 2014, when I knew the job I had held in a place I’d been working for 10 years was ending (though not yet officially), I did what anyone would do: I went on a trip with my mother and sister to Northern New Mexico.

Actually, this story starts much earlier. Does it start in April of that year when I am offered a demotion or no job at all and I take the demotion because we are in the process of closing on a condo for our daughters to live in while they attend Indiana University in Bloomington? Or a year earlier, when it is obvious I am struggling while juggling different roles and different requirements from different stakeholders?

Or does it start in 2009, when I take the promotion I think I want and that I am kind of good at, as it is defined in 2009 and three weeks later I am diagnosed with Lupus? Or does it start in 2008 when my father dies? Or in 1986 when I am a young woman at odds with her understanding of herself, or in 1976, when I am a teenager who doesn’t fit in and finds the options available unsatisfactory but I don’t know how to ask my mother or anyone for help? Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health

The Howling Wounded Thing

June 11, 2018

CW: This essay discusses suicide. If you or someone you know needs immediate help, please call 911. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at: 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741. The world needs you.

By Beth Cartino

“I just want to get really high and then go to sleep forever.” They sits across from me in a dreary, unadorned office, knees tucked under their chin, arms hugging their legs tight to their chest, eyes peering out at me from behind a veil of midnight blue hair. This is the pose they adopt when they’re feeling exposed and vulnerable. They are in middle school, but they have the experience of someone twice their age, and right now, at this moment, they look painfully young.

“Have you been thinking about suicide?” My voice is even, my eyes unflinching. I notice a physical urge, like the one you get when you want to scratch your nose, to mirror their posture. I don’t. I ask myself a question I frequently ask when working with a kid who is thinking about suicide. What could somebody have said to me when I was twelve that would have stopped me from trying to kill myself? I never can come up with an answer but this is the message I try to convey, not only with my words, but with every cell in my body: “You are loved. I see you. I will not judge you. I am here with you. I am not going anywhere. You are not broken. You are not a problem that needs fixing.”

*** Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts, Mental Health

Couched

May 4, 2018

By Tina Porter

It was way too early for a knock on the door, but there it was; and there I was, in my red terrycloth bathrobe. I hadn’t seen the two women come up the walkway, but here they were, looking back at me through the big window of the front door.

“Hi,” I said as I slowly opened the door, clamping one hand on the two frayed lapels of my robe while running the other hand over my just-out-of-bed hair.

“We’re sorry to bother you,” said the lady in the front, who had an officiousness that took me off guard as she stood there in clothes almost as worn as my robe. “Is that couch available? Would you care if we took it?” She pointed over her shoulder, to the chocolate-brown, ultra-padded, ultra-suede, three-cushioned couch sitting on the curb, between our mailbox and the garbage bins.

“Oh, no,” I said. “You don’t want it,” I shook my head and pinched up my face. “It’s so … gross.”

“I have a steam cleaner,” she said while the woman behind her looked over her shoulder at the couch, trying to hide the look in her eyes that betrayed she agreed more with me than with her friend.

“I’m not going to say no,” I said, after taking a deep breath, “because it is obviously out there for the garbage man. But ….” and I trailed off, mimicking repulsion with my face and with a shudder that ran through my body. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health

Spun

March 2, 2018

By Tessa Torgeson

I wore all black from the tip of my pointed witch’s hat, to my wig, to my boots. Meanwhile my younger sister Tara pranced around wearing her purple floral gown complete with a tiara, sparkly wings, and a light-up wand.

It was Halloween of 1991. The kitschy sounds of “Monster Mash” played as the banshee wind rattled the trees. The bite of a Midwest autumn day made our cheeks rosy and our fingertips white. We brewed apple cider, the warm tang of cinnamon sticks on our tongue.

Mom applied special rouge, pastel eyeshadow, and pink lipstick to Tara’s face. Now that Tara was it was my turn to feel like a movie star. Mom applied black lipstick, a hint of mascara, and white face powder to my face. It looked like a hideous mask that I wanted to peel off. I looked sickly; Tara looked ethereal.

The boiling point came when my mom drew a realistic wart on my nose with black eyeliner. With hot tears running down my face, I stormed down the hall of our split-level house to my bedroom. I slammed the door with all the fury a five-year-old girl could muster and kicked aside the mess of Barbie dolls strewn on the snot-green carpet on Tara’s side of the room. Grabbing an Arthur picture book off the shelf, I grabbed my tattered yellow blanket, and curled into bed. I felt like I had just swallowed a porcupine, spikes of anger and jealousy jabbed me. Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts, Mental Health

The Me and The She

December 27, 2017

By Adrienne LaValley

I’m a little blue today. Not the Ceylon sapphire blue I’d love to be enveloped in. Royal blue, cerulean blue, turquoise like the ocean or any other variety of azure. The blue that leaves me confused, unsure, and downright loathing of anyone able to plaster a smile on their face. Fuck them. That kind of blue. Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts

Dropping By To See What Condition My Depression Is In

October 18, 2017

By Amy Gesenhues

My nose is crooked. It happened the Thursday before election night last November. I was walking my dog in the dark, looking at my phone and not paying attention. I tripped and fell face first into my neighbor’s brick mailbox so hard it broke my nose. It hurt like hell and made my face into a bloody mess.

I’ve been going back to that night, replaying the events between then and the following Tuesday when the whole world felt like it collapsed in on so many of us, unable to make sense of the election results. I’m trying to pin-point the date my latest round of depression began. As if that’s something you can do — trace a line of sadness, your very own trail of tears back to a moment in time, the same as you would go about finding the last text from someone you love.

Depression is a tricky mother fucker. Mine starts as a slow drift into the what-does-any-of-it-matter-abyss. There are always signs along the way that I never catch until long after I’ve passed them. Obsessively thinking about everything I’ve done wrong. The friends I’ve lost. All the wrongs done to me (or so, I tell myself). I buy more and more books, but read less and less. I sneak handfuls of Nestle chocolate morsels throughout the day – a stand-in for the Camel Lights I gave up ten years ago. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, suicide

Mental Illness is a Terminal Disease

October 8, 2017

By Kellie Julia

The picture above is of three of my most favorite people, 2 are gone. My gram died at 93 of natural causes. My son died at 31 and there was nothing natural about it.

I gave my son’s phone away this week to someone who really needed it. It seems like an easy enough thing to do but I cried for hours after. I saved the last text message I had from him which said “I love you too”, that was 5 days before he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. That was 5 months ago.

I still wonder what would have happened if I had gotten to his house 5 hours earlier than I did, what if I would have begged him to please hold on just one more day. No matter what I did or said for many years I could not take his pain away. Believe me, I tried. Do I find comfort in knowing that he is free of pain, yes. Would I rather have him still in pain but here with me instead, yes. Do I feel that is selfish of me, yes. Many suicidal people believe that the world would be a better place without them. Is it? No! Mental illness is a terminal disease and it should be treated that way. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health

A Reluctant Dance

September 28, 2017

By Diane E. Baumer

Plastic and expressionless, they lay in a pile, haphazardly tossed in with the fluffy pink elephant, the snow white Dalmatian with dark black spots, and the bright orange snake with the long red tongue named after my uncle Don. Of my treasured dolls, my favorite was Chickenhead. Her indelicate name came from my grandfather, who had aptly described her ratty coarse brown stand-up hair, the product of months and months of being grasped in a tiny hand and dragged along to every engagement that could ever be considered important in a 6-year-old’s life.

Chickenhead lived with the rest of my dolls and stuffed animals in a tall cardboard box tucked in the corner of a closet in the master bedroom that spanned the front of the house; my parents’ bed was in the center of the room, and I slept at the foot, in a kid-sized bed, complete with railings so I wouldn’t fall out. I’d sometimes crawl in the closet during the day, or late at night when I couldn’t sleep. With the door closed, it was dark as night and it was so quiet it would almost shut out the tense but hushed quarrels from the living room. It was child-small, but comfortably cozy, filled with that woody smell that comes with old houses and hardwood floors. I did all my thinking and wondering and worrying there, even though my mom said I was too young to have anything to worry about. The way I saw it, though, she only had me to look after. I had her and Chickenhead and Mrs. Beasley and all my other dolls to protect. I remember one morning when dad was home and we were sitting on the red couch in the living room – mom called it a divan in those days – and he took my doll dressed in the pretty pink gingham dress and threw her against the wall, laughing. I watched her, eyes wide and unblinking, tumbling through the air in slow motion, skirt flying up and exposing her shamefully. She hit the wall with a thud and slid down, landing in a heap on the floor, unmoving. My dad’s laughter echoed in my head, as I sat there, horrified. “That,” he said, “is what happens to little girls when they misbehave.” He tousled my hair. “But you’re a good girl, aren’t you?” My chest felt tight; I couldn’t catch my breath. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health, suicide

Seeing You After Suicide

September 15, 2017

By Alyssa Limperis

I get obsessed with suicide. I don’t want to kill myself. I don’t want anyone to kill themselves. But whenever I hear that someone committed suicide, I can’t get it out of my head. I get obsessed with them. I read everything about their life and try to understand when death became their only option. When death became an exhale to an unthinkably laborious inhale. When was that moment and was I around to witness it? Was I deaf to the noise of the final last gasps?

It’s strange but once someone dies of suicide, I start expecting to see them everywhere. I look for them on the streets, waiting to hold them and see them in peace and say it’s ok. I love you. So many of us love you. We are holding your pain and overnight, it has become our own. We didn’t know it had gotten this far but you are not alone and we will hold you until the pain dulls. I look for these people on the street to tell them how important they are to us and how the days without them have felt like months. But they aren’t there. They won’t be there. Instead, we now have to find them and carry them with us through the remainder of our journey here. We will have to see them in a memory, find them in a song. We will keep them with us but they don’t get to stay. Continue Reading…

Older Posts

Newer Posts