About me

Introduction	I graduated from Harvard University where I studied Social, Medical & Psychiatric Anthropology with an interest in the relationship between culture and ‘mental illness’. My honors thesis explored the ways in which individuals living with psychiatric diagnoses and taking psychotropic medications construct a sense of self. I confess that this topic choice was greatly influenced by my own struggles to make sense of who I was at the time—a young woman labeled ‘mentally ill’, confused about whether my feelings and thoughts were mine or my medications’. Diagnosed with major depression at age fourteen and re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age eighteen, I came to believe that I would spend my life in and out of psychiatric hospitals, on numerous medications, and with little hope of a life of meaning and purpose. Today, I consider myself to be in full recovery from ‘mental illness’. I no longer live with a psychiatric diagnosis and I tapered off of the last of my psychotropic medications, which I had taken for nearly a decade. I live my life today with a profoundly different understanding of the nature of emotional suffering that lies outside of the biomedical realm.

Introduction

I graduated from Harvard University where I studied Social, Medical & Psychiatric Anthropology with an interest in the relationship between culture and ‘mental illness’. My honors thesis explored the ways in which individuals living with psychiatric diagnoses and taking psychotropic medications construct a sense of self. I confess that this topic choice was greatly influenced by my own struggles to make sense of who I was at the time—a young woman labeled ‘mentally ill’, confused about whether my feelings and thoughts were mine or my medications’. Diagnosed with major depression at age fourteen and re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age eighteen, I came to believe that I would spend my life in and out of psychiatric hospitals, on numerous medications, and with little hope of a life of meaning and purpose. Today, I consider myself to be in full recovery from ‘mental illness’. I no longer live with a psychiatric diagnosis and I tapered off of the last of my psychotropic medications, which I had taken for nearly a decade. I live my life today with a profoundly different understanding of the nature of emotional suffering that lies outside of the biomedical realm.