Category: Stigma

  • Self-acceptance and Self-Awareness: Zabian’s Welcome Home

    Self-acceptance and Self-Awareness: Zabian’s Welcome Home

    Self-acceptance and self-awareness are key to building a solid foundation in our lives, writes Najwa Zabian in her book Welcome Home. When I started reading the book and its powerful description of how the foundations of the homes of our lives are built on self-acceptance and self-awareness, rather than on other things that would lead…

  • The Haters

    The Haters

    There is a lot of wonder I have right now at how my life is playing out. I’m really grateful. But I’m also thinking about how neuroatypical people shame people like me, and how people like me tend to be writers or artists of myriad types of others who don’t fit in. Mental illness is…

  • Loving what is…and stepping off the success treadmill

    Loving what is…and stepping off the success treadmill

    It has been an interesting journey to where I am now and I definitely think that my life is richer now and my experiences more meaningful than they were when I was an ambitious and successful 20-something. When I interact with friends who are still on the success treadmill, I do so with a mix…

  • Jealousy

    Jealousy

    Jealousy doesn’t happen often for me anymore. I’ve made my neuroatypical life so unique that it is really unusual for me to hear about someone and to then be jealous of them. But it finally happened. I discovered a bio online of a professor around my age, who has the same research interests as me,…

  • Reading about Schizophrenia

    Reading about Schizophrenia

    I started suffering from schizotypal symptoms in 2011 after being traumatized by a man who was in authority over me. I didn’t realize that trauma could form such a lasting and hidden wound as delusions, which hide their medical reality from the sufferer and seem like life is something that it is not. That you’re…

  • Growth

    Growth

    Mental health is stigmatized in the church. People criticize my religious experience as being an outcropping of mental illness. Meanwhile, other people’s mental illnesses hinder people from being able to experience the God they already worship. People might lack assurance of their salvation and worry about their soul. One man with schizophrenia wrote that he…