The Mental Illness Dispatches

There is no question that makes me more uncomfortable, that makes my mind and heart freeze more, than the question, “What Do You Do?” I dread it in every conversation that I have, with people I haven’t seen in a few years, with people that I am meeting for the first time. It’s one of those stock questions that we ask without thinking much about it, because it’s ingrained in us in a society that values not so much hard work as that hard work necessarily produces a social and economic outcome. It may only be a few of us who are fighting those unseen battles, but nonetheless, I’d like for everyone to think twice before habit permits it to escape their lips. Like all of the stuff on this blog so far, this was originally posted elsewhere. I'm sure if you look hard enough, you can find it. Bon courage.

Simply talking about prevention is overlooking the real problem. I hadn’t known who Kate Spade is, other than that she seems to have mattered a lot in the minds of many people. I don’t know anything about the state of her health leading up to her death, I don’t know if her suicide was carefully premeditated or was an act of sudden desperation. I’m not going to speculate, because such intimate queries do disrespect her privacy, her integrity as a person. They are important, for her, but they are not ours to have, they are not to be peddled for sympathy, or a voracious public that, whether they admit it or not, are all too willing to devour everything they can, all the speculation, minor leaked details, that are printed in everything from US Weekly to the New York Times. But I’ve been saying for a long time…our lives are not defined by our death, and suicide is no different. Yes, mental illnesses do play a significant role in shaping who we are, how we see the world, how we see othe...

to those left behind by the annual “Mental Health Inspiration Porn Month” Dear Warriors, I have a long history, and it would take far too many paragraphs to go into now. I think it all started when I was fifteen. Around then, I think I first started the depressive thoughts which would later come to dominate my life, or at least to serve as a catalyst for some of the things that I experienced, that happened to me. My folks are what you could call “well-to-do people.” They make good money. I am incredibly proud of them. And I can’t say I was mistreated, or dismissed, throughout my life. But it’s around that time that I was fifteen years old that shit started to get real. I started having thoughts. That I wasn’t good enough. That maybe my life should have been taking a different direction. That maybe I was doing everything wrong, and perhaps I should have been doing something different. It was about when I was 16 when I experienced my first hospitalization. I can’t find a way...

Little fragments of little stories. Dispatches from the trenches. I. “Let’s go for a walk.” I’m sitting on the couch, arms curled up, staring intently at the space heater resting near the base of his chair. Black, cylindrical, it almost reminds me of an Alexa or Echo or whatever those fancy voice assistants are called. I kind of want to ask it to play Joanna Newsom; preferably one of her longer, expansive and meandering compositions, strings swelling like waves that rock my psyche, gentle but slightly seasick, the harp strings even evoking a mild ASMR-like tingle in my chest. My therapist is looking at me, directly but gently, dressed in his usual plaid bow tie and round dark-rimmed glasses. He looks, as always, like a slightly eccentric, extremely easy-going Argentinian, which, of course he is, his voice soft with a pleasant Latin-Spanish twinge. He exudes calm but I never pick up on it; my body remains tense, my mind hovering above it, disconnected and unfamiliar. I’ve alw...

This short piece was initially posted on a now-mostly-defunct tumblr page not long after the Las Vegas shooting. Sadly, the narrative has proved so repetitive that it doesn’t even need an update. There have been so many mass shootings just in the past couple of months: Las Vegas, Antioch (near where I live), Sutherland Springs. Maybe not in that order, and definitely not limited to them — that’s only what I saw in the news and can remember. And in the wake of them, everyone tosses around what they personally think might help prevent more mass killings — as they should, even though some of them come across as less than sincere. I’m not going to offer anything here, because a) I don’t want this to be an overly political rant, and b) it’s not like I know much to begin with. But I do take issue with one annoyingly constant trope in all of this, which goes back many years and an uncountable number of mass shootings: Mental Health. Whenever a massacre occurs, mental health inevitably ...

Mental illness is tough. It’s also utterly absurd. The American Public Media podcast  The Hilarious World of Depression  asks every guest the same question at the top of the show: Is depression funny? I’m not very funny and I’m definitely not well known enough to be invited to be on the show, but I have an opinion and damn it, it’s the Internet, and the Internet is going to hear my story! (Actual human beings, probably not. That’s up to them.) So…  Is  depression funny? Yes. It is. I don’t mean that  suffering  from depression is funny. I’m in the midst of the worst episode I’ve had in years, and the trifecta of exhaustion, anxiety, and an absence of any will to live is kinda sucky. If someone confides in you that they’re having a really rough time and are contemplating killing themselves, you don’t respond with “Omfg that is the most hilarious thing you have ever said to me, you are  cracking me up  right now lmao!” That is very rude a...