dispatches from crazyville

I teach high school English in the Midwest. I’m writing this blog because 5 years ago, when I first entered the mental healthcare system, I felt terrified and isolated. I didn’t know it was possible to feel any way other than the way I felt, to function in a different, healthier way. I believed stereotypes about mental illness: that people who were depressed or anxious were weak and could just get over it on their own, and that actual mental illness looked like sybil. I wish I could have found information about what it was like to be mentally ill and in treatment. I was frightened of treatment, frightened that the people who could help me would hate me, or dismiss me as a whiny baby, or as incurable.

I hope to change some of the damaging stereotypes people have about mental illness, to show a side of bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or anxiety or dissociative disorder that people can recognize some shared human truths in. I also hope people who are struggling find something useful in these stories, so that they feel less lonely and can believe that, even though the path out of chaotic darkness is difficult, it’s possible.