Mad in America
AUGUST 17, 2024
T his is the story of Will, a young man who plunged into an extreme state following exposure to a synthetic street drug, which led to repeat psychiatric hospitalizations—and the effect on family members who supported him along the way. So his hospitalization nearly doubled his separation from his family. We were kept in the dark.
Mad in America
NOVEMBER 5, 2024
He was escorted him out of the clinic, handcuffed to a gurney in an ambulance, and taken to our county’s mental hospital. When I was finally permitted to see him three days later, he was lying on the ground in the hospital’s rec room, alone, shaking from the side effects of the Haldol they had given him. But it didn’t help.
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Mad in America
FEBRUARY 21, 2024
Kasdan is a longtime business and technology writer who pivoted to memoir writing on a quest to tell her sister’s story, joining the Westport Writers’ Workshop. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 23, and she was ultimately hospitalized many times, right? She was in and out of the hospital. Kasdan : Many, many times.
Mad in America
FEBRUARY 8, 2024
I found a very informative letter dated years after Mom’s hospitalization addressed to her new psychiatrist. But the drugs failed to help my mother’s depression, and Dad told the doctor that “by the end of May ’59 she was so bad…I didn’t see how she could avoid hospitalization.”
Mad in America
NOVEMBER 9, 2023
This is also the same conference where I listened to a workshop presenter go on at length about the “suicide tumor,” but that’s a story for another time.) One person exclaimed: I am not troubled by the increase in hospitalizations. The upside of the involuntary hospitalization numbers is that fewer people are likely dead of suicide.
Mad in America
AUGUST 28, 2024
Autoimmunity increases the risk of having a psychotic episode, and if you’re labeled with psychosis or schizophrenia, you’re also much more likely to be hospitalized for an autoimmune disease. At one point, I did a workshop on psychiatric advance directives, and Peter Stasny , a radical psychiatrist, happened to be in the audience.
Mad in America
SEPTEMBER 4, 2024
An account of the abuse he suffered after being hospitalized in a psychiatric facility at age 15 and the long journey toward joy and awe that followed, his memoir was published this spring by Penguin Random House. If you don’t mind, if we could start with the chair—with your hospitalization. How did this story start?
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