Sitting in my wheelchair on the Intensive Care Patient Unit at the DePaul Psychiatric facility, I wept loudly and openly at the sight before me. “How am I back here?!” It wasn’t a question. I lost all sense of whatever decorum and dignity I had left, as I was under the watchful eye of no […]
Personal Experience
No Care For The Doomed: Intensive Care Ward
I’d only been on the Intensive Care Patients’ ward for five minutes before I accidentally made an enemy of a hostile schizophrenic woman who presented the possibility of danger. I wasn’t wrong. The primary purpose of the Intensive Care Patients’ ward is to prevent harm to self or others. If you’re dangerous, ICP is your […]
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My Accident and the Hospital
It started with a hot piece of glass. I’d sucked hot flame through the empty, broken glass bowl of a waterpipe I use to smoke hemp flower until it was hotter than it had been since its creation, and I slowly and confidently pressed it into the soft, sensitive, hairless skin of my inner forearm. […]
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A Lamp and Food Stamps (a nightmare episode and then… success)
I had a horrible episode yesterday that culminated in me spending the night at my parents’ house. I hadn’t been to their house since late January except for one 3 minute trip inside to meet the new cats. I was in a desperate place. I could go into detail of all the problem situations I […]
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What I would say if I could go back in time to my newly-diagnosed self.
Your psychosis ends. Hospitalizations end. Your episodes end. No matter how far away you go, you always come back. It will hurt like hell and you’ll see only one way out. Hold on. Don’t let it win. Stay stubborn enough to not let it win. The hospital is where you go to start getting better. […]
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Hypomanic! WHEEE!
I feel like I should cook, but I know that’s against the rules. I might break the rules and just be hypervigilant and set timer alarms for everything I do. OK, Google, help me cook a hypomanic meal! Google? Google!!! I demand you cater to my needs. I really hope the AI decide to be […]
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Why My “Label” Was A Gift
It was 3 AM, and my heart was racing. I was searching the internet for medical conditions that would account for the horrible abdominal pain I’d been in for the previous 4 months. I had gone to the doctor three times and gotten three different diagnoses and treatments (including a full-body CAT-scan) and was nowhere […]
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What I Do In Therapy
We start with Truth. Truth is always at the heart of healing, and finding it is the ultimate goal of therapy. In a recent session, I was dealing with the problematic and painful cognition “I am a bad person/I am broken”. This was a huge problem for me for several years, but had gone away […]
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Congratulations! You’re a Horrible Person.
Am I a bad person? If I am, how can I be better? I’ll do whatever it takes to be better, please just tell me how. My introduction to borderline personality disorder was through my best friend and my mother, both of whom I love very much. They both have mothers who have been diagnosed […]
