Tag: mental illness

Esmé Weijun Wang discovers a new interpretation of faith while on two kindred pilgrimages: one to find an accurate medical diagnosis, one to a sacred site in New Mexico.

“All you needed to do,” Springsteen says, “was to risk being your true self.” We ignore our demons at our peril.

When a journalist tries to understand her father’s claims of CIA surveillance, she learns to see her digital world in a very different light.

How and when did prisons become one of the New York’s major providers of mental health care — and can we actually call it “care”?

After suicides and heartbreak ravage her family, Jenny Aurthur finds she has no choice but be transformed.

“Rebirth therapy” was meant to help a troubled girl start over, but it ended her life instead.

After his high school friend drowns, a young academic’s mind leads him down a dark path of conspiratorial explanations.

Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house. I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.

Gayle Brandeis takes two trips to Sin City with her mother — one while her mother is delusional.

She keeps watch over one of the largest databases of missing persons in the country. For Meaghan Good, the disappeared are still out here, you just have to know where to look.

An interview with ProPublica’s Sarah Smith about the continued neglect of the mentally ill.

“He has demons.” The language of madness is the last resort for a society that can no longer deny the evidence of structural oppression and violence.

Talking about it is terrifying, but not talking about it is deadly.

W.H. Auden named it 70 years ago, and our latest age of anxiety is one of Xanax, fidget spinners, and constant swiping.

Stacy Torres recalls the mixture of frustration and relief that came with checking herself into a New York City psych ward at the age of 20.

For people with severe, depression, deep-brain stimulation offers an uncertain but potentially life-altering solution.

For Alex DiFrancesco, coming out as transgender—even to themself—wasn’t possible without first disappearing.

In STAT, Eric Boodman examines delusional parasitosis, a psychiatric condition neither science nor medicine understand much about.

In a fascinating New York magazine profile of John Hinckley, recently released, writer Lisa Miller lays out the conditions of his freedom.

Mitigation specialist Jennifer Wynn investigates the upbringings of defendants on trial — often for their lives — to humanize clients in a bid to convince at least one juror to bypass the death penalty for a life in prison without parole.

The theater and lit worlds suffered a great loss this week with the passing, Tuesday, of Elizabeth Swados, 64, a prolific writer and composer .

In “Fashioning Normal,” Esmé Weijun Wang writes at Catapult about performing wellness in the midst of mental illness.

Here, I’ve collected several stories about mental illness, many written by writers of color.

For centuries, courts have struggled to protect the mentally ill while also trying to distinguish between sanity and insanity. In the 1700s, the British courts relied on the “wild beast” test as their barometer for the latter: if the defendant’s understanding of his crime was no better than that of a infant or beast, he couldn’t […]

Like advanced directives for the dying, DuBrul explained, mad maps allow psychiatric patients to outline what they’d like their care to look like in future mental health crises. The logic is: If a person can define health, while healthy, and differentiate health from crisis, that person can shape his or her own care. The maps […]

“Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.” Mac McClelland, Mother Jones

“My Son Is Schizophrenic. The ‘Reforms’ That I Worked for Have Worsened His Life.” — Paul Gionfriddo, The Washington Post More from The Washington Post

An inquiry into a neighbor’s suicide leads a man to discover links between heavy marijuana use and psychosis among people who suffer from mental illnesses: One afternoon recently, I met Dr. Roger Roffman, professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work, in his office up on Roosevelt Way. He has a calm […]