How the hell did I get here is a question that comes about with a fair amount of frequency in the course of an alcoholic or addicted life. Wind up waking up next to someone you’ve never seen before in… Read More ›
Mental Health
Young Men With Old Brains: The Hard Realities of Traumatic Brain Injury in Sport
Editor’s Note: In light of the recent controversy surrounding the NFL’s handling of Junior Seau’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony and a new settlement challenging the terms of NFL’s concussion settlement that was filed in a U.S. Circuit Court by… Read More ›
The State Mental Health “Diagnose & Dash”
On the outskirts of downtown Traverse City, Michigan, just beyond the northern tourist bustle of Front Street but before reaching the vast expanse of shopping centers and strip malls that serve as the consumer mecca for the smattering of towns… Read More ›
Deinstitutionalizing Harry: How America Has Failed Its Severely & Persistently Mentally Ill
A couple of years ago, Mother Jones‘ Deanna Pan posted a great, although brief, timeline of deinstitutionalization in the United States’ mental health system, running from the 1st mental patient admitted to an asylum in the 18th century1Â to the present… Read More ›
Reasonable Accommodation: The Supreme Court Case That Will Decide Whether Or Not Mentally Ill Lives Matter
There are no surer guarantors of the extraordinary than a story which is prefaced by a explanation of how ordinary things had seemed in its beginning. Ask survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Center or Pearl Harbor to… Read More ›
When ‘It Gets Better’ Isn’t Enough: Leelah Alcorn & The Struggles of Transgender Youth
Adolescence is a wretched place—a charnel house chock full of freshly formed skeletons waiting to be shoved into closets and strange erogenous urgings that spring up at the most inappropriate moments. It is a time of kinky little hairs that… Read More ›
What We Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health: The NYPD Shooting & Mental Illness in America
This past summer, I was being a good twenty-something and flossing my teeth with one of those tiny flosser-thingies with the handle on them when the floss caught itself in a little gap between one of my molars and the… Read More ›
Watching As He Wastes Away: How a Kentucky Prison Let a Mentally Ill Man Starve to Death
As I type this, a delectable, carbohydrate filled pretzel bagel from Servatti’s is busy baking in the convection oven of my favorite coffee shop. Within the next minute or so that bagel will be brought out to my table and… Read More ›
Void My Bowels & Fill Me With Truth Serum: A Look at Aversion Therapy for Alcohol & Drug Abuse
Sometimes I miss it. Not all of it, but some of it. The part of it that made me feel like nothing. Not nothing in an empty way, but nothing in a weightless way, as if the physical properties that… Read More ›
Before the Journey Comes…The Mental Hospital?
On the morning of July 2nd I will set off in my little Toyota Corolla to begin what should be an 8,000 mile trip across America and then back again, all in search of some nebulous insight regarding what has… Read More ›
Virally Suppressed - Muckraking For The Modern World 