I don't believe in accidents. I believe that I was meant to find my tribe, eventually. It was through an experience of synchronicity that I found my people"”our loose-knit, decentralized movement of "crazy" artists, spiritual revolutionaries, and activists that defies easy categorization. At the suggestion of my therapist, who wanted me to go back on meds, I went to the bookstore to find Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac. That book was not on the shelf; instead, I found Peter Breggin's Talking Back to Prozac. I read the book in one night, and it caused an earthquake in my life. Everything, I mean everything, shifted: instead of shame and isolation, I experienced for the first time a healthy anger at Big Pharma and a mental health system that had oppressed me (and my parents, who were both diagnosed as bipolar). I wrote to Breggin about my experiences, shattering years of uneasy silence, and he wrote back, suggesting I get in touch with MindFreedom and the psychiatric survivors' movement. Encouraged by my fellow psychiatric survivors, I developed my own defining narrative, "came out," and began to speak out publicly about my experiences. I fired that therapist, and started to create, agitate, and organize.

Never underestimate the power of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. The very first step in my healing from trauma and oppression was to narrate my experience. MindFreedom gave me the first opportunity to do that. I wrote down my story for the first time and it was posted on their website as part of an amazing oral history project. I found it incredibly liberating to reframe the narrative of my life. I became politicized; seeing what happened to me, and to my parents, as part of a larger, universal story of oppression and liberation. But somewhere along the line things got a little distorted. I noticed that as a "psychiatric survivor activist," I began to tell my life story as if my personal struggle was all in the past. The underlying thread was "I was oppressed as a kid, medicated against my will, institutionalized, but I'm fine now. I'm better than fine, I'm great! I'm a survivor." And all of that was true. Until it wasn't 100% true.

I was so invested in being an EX-crazy person, a psychiatric survivor, someone who's "OK now" that I forgot to acknowledge to others"”and to myself"”how much I still struggled with my mind. I still was overwhelmed with crushingly dark moods that took over my life for days and weeks at a time. Although I now understood the darkness in a different way"”that I was responding in a natural way to a fucked-up world"”it didn't make it any less painful. I still felt terrorized on a regular basis by "messages" in my mind, which constantly reminded me of my inferiority and defectiveness. And while I didn't take psych meds, I smoked way too much pot trying to cope with these unwanted mental states. Meanwhile, I was running myself down with a ridiculous and unsustainable schedule of activism, over-commitment, and overwork. I was all business.

In January of 2004, my body, mind, and spirit revolted against me. In the middle of all that, a fellow activist was going through a hard time and I shut down; I literally couldn't be there for her. As a person doing work around "mental health issues," that was a real wake-up call. After that happened, I was forced to re-evaluate everything. I had no choice but to slow down my frenzied pace, and to learn to take care of myself. I had never acquired the tools to address my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs in a way that worked for me. For that, I turned to the holistic health movement. To get a handle on my difficult mind states, I turned to Buddhist meditation. Those were the things I needed to learn to be able to function in the world.

Today, I am in the midst of my own personal paradigm shift, and it feels right. The terms by which I understand my life, and my work on mental health issues, are constantly evolving, and I think that's a good thing, because language can be liberating and limiting at the same time. Those of us who have been labeled in ways that have hurt us perhaps are especially sensitive to the power and constraints of language.

What I'm about to write is a generalization, but it is my experience. While certainly not all people in the psychiatric survivors' movement share this perspective, there is an overwhelming tendency to judge anyone who chooses to take meds or utilize traditional mental health services as someone who is "brainwashed" by psychiatry. I know that this bias is based on common experiences of being traumatized by the mental health system and scary medications. But I can only imagine how alienating it can be for folks like my father, who choose to take meds but have a real discontent with how the system works (or doesn't, rather). We get trapped in either/or, black/white dichotomies, "us" vs. "them," mental health "consumer" vs. "psychiatric survivor." I got caught up in all of those politics for a while, and really had to fight against the biases in myself. Today I reject the rigid pro- and anti- med stances. Our minds and our lives are so complex and mysterious. Today I believe that there is no one "right answer" when it comes to what helps our heads. We all need to have as many tools at our disposal as possible to keep ourselves above water.

Today I choose to leave myself undefined. I know the terms "psychiatric survivor" and "ex-patient" are supposed to be empowering, and they were empowering for me for a while, but they soon became oppressive, almost as oppressive as the mental health labels I'd been given, bound up as they were for me with a sense of myself as a helpless victim. Yes, I am a victim of terrible, demeaning things that were done to me "in the name of help" as a young person. Yes, I am the daughter of two amazing parents who were deeply oppressed by the mental health system as well. That is my legacy, and it fuels my passion. But I cannot sustain a definition of myself solely, or even primarily, as Survivor Of The Bad Things That Happened To Me. Likewise, in my art and other work, I cannot limit my focus to what's wrong in the world; I have to focus equally, if not more so, on how we can not only survive, but thrive, in spite of all that; on how we can build sustainable alternatives to the institutions of corporate psychiatry. I want to have conversations not just on how evil Big Pharma is, but also on the ways we have learned"”and are still learning as we go"”to care for ourselves, and each other. That's the movement I hope to be a part of building.