Chances are you’ve been on your own rollercoaster ride with mental health recently. The Doe is here for you. 

Our narratives for this theme include a tale from inside the opioid crisis, grappling with an eating disorder during the COVID-19 lockdown and trying to say goodbye to a father by perusing YouTube comments. We hope you can find some solace and, perhaps, even joy within.

Anonymous narratives discussing suicide, anxiety, depression, and everything mental health-related. Unbiased, verified stories to spread awareness.

Mental Health Narratives - Suicide, Anxiety, Depression - The Doe

Mental Health

What people don’t realize about drugs that are prescribed to you by doctors is that it takes a very long time to even consider the idea that you have a problem with those drugs. If you’ve been prescribed Xanax, as I was, any physical or mental reactions to withdrawal will be filed away in your head as Problems of Your Own Making. 

Back up for a second and think about it: You feel anxious and miserable, so you go and ask your doctor about the feelings. He’s not going to tell you to go to therapy or think about AA. He’s going to give you the option that makes him money and keeps you coming back—some kind of pill.

So you take the pill, and it works. The drugs tend to work, and that's why we’re here. For a while, at least, this system doesn’t fail. Your body hasn't become habituated to the drugs, so they keep working, and you feel more relaxed because you can still feel the drug and you are telling yourself you’re less anxious because you can feel the drug. The drugs don't tell you the truth, though, which is that your body is feeling something but you are actually the one calming yourself down. Your brain simply reacts to the change in the body, and you find your own calm because your body is telling you that you should. You’re doing the heavy lifting.

But as your body habituates to the drug, the withdrawals become more palpable. You begin to sense the half-life of the drug, intensely. But that’s not what you’re telling yourself, because you’re taking the drug as medicine for anxiety. When the withdrawals kick in, you assume that your anxiety has gotten worse—not the drug—and that you are somehow to blame for the feelings you’re having. You just need more of the drug, that’s all. That is the new prescription you give yourself.

The doctor will not explain this to you, any more than he will explain that you don’t actually need the drug. He will not recommend meditation or any of the various things that will connect you to yourself and give you control of your emotions. He will connect you to a drug that will take control of your body.

I have never done Oxy but I am fairly sure this is what happens to Oxy users who start taking the drugs after an accident, as prescribed. The opioid epidemic has managed to gather some of the attention that benzos can’t, because benzo users aren’t dying. Oxy is much more powerful than benzos, so the fallout there is much bigger—you can overdose. With benzos, it’s pretty hard to overdose unless you combine them with something else. That fact that our lives are coming apart isn’t good enough for the newspaper writers, who want bodies and blood. 

Again, though—these are drugs prescribed to you by doctors. When you start feeling bad, the best you’ll get from a doctor, as I heard from mine, is: “Well, stop for a week and you’ll go crazy and then it will be over.” This, at some level, is technically true. I suppose if I had that kind of faith in myself and my strength, I would have done that. But it doesn’t feel true, and the physical withdrawal from benzos is savage. My light-headedness made it seem as if I might completely fracture and actually, somehow, concretely lose my mind, like it might float away. No doctor has ever said: “This drug feels pretty cool but is wildly addictive and will generate an entirely new dependency you don’t have right now, in this split second before you start taking it.” All of the awful feelings you are having and attributing to your anxiety are so baffling and clandestine. They are anxious feelings, but they are a reaction to the bodily condition brought on by the drugs themselves. Xanax works quickly, like booze, and it combined with my alcoholism beautifully.

When you realize that the medicine is trying to kill you, you’re halfway there, but you’re still alone. There are very few models for tapering off of benzos, and the best one is in a free PDF called The Ashton Manual. I didn’t trust it at first, because it was free. I wanted to go somewhere and pay money to get clean. That didn’t happen. I flailed, trying to get myself off benzos. The results were awful. I was at work, taping a podcast, and the panic set in so severely that I had to bail on the podcast and walk out of the building. It didn’t get me fired but that kind of stuff adds up to an atmospheric portrait of a person. The lovely man I was talking to didn’t have any idea what was going on. All I could say was, “I don’t feel great,” which makes people think you’re going to throw up. So I pretended I had a stomach condition because those usually demand some kind of immediate attention. And that’s a smaller version of the larger problem: You can’t tell people what’s happening because you yourself don’t yet believe it.

Without an explanation, if you haven’t admitted to yourself what’s going on with the benzos, you end up as puzzled as the people around you. Why, exactly, are you so anxious? You don’t know what your body is doing to you, and you don’t know how to make it stop. Mostly the drug wins. If you have enough benzos on hand, you can just wild out and pound them. My metabolism and weight and chemistry meant that I couldn’t really ever do too many. They just felt good. The reasons to stop felt weak. If benzo users overdosed more, maybe we’d get clean faster.

My hopes around this becoming a bigger public health issue are minimal. I occasionally talk to another user who’s flailing. Last week, I talked to a woman who was struggling with them after doing them for only a month. She’d been straight-edge her whole life but started having anxiety around COVID. She absolutely could not believe that her anxiety wasn’t controllable, even though she could see clearly that it had never been that bad in the 40 previous years. She also realized that the short time she’d been on benzos sort of proved the drug was correlated to her anxiety spike—there was a one-to-one correspondence. Even knowing all of that, the bodily withdrawal symptoms were so severe that she was terrified of going off the drug entirely. All I could do was tell her to titrate down as low as she could for as long as she needed. But then she would need to jump. And I told her the mantra I used, the one that got me clean:

“I’m not gonna die,” I told myself, over and over, as I walked around Morningside Heights.

And it was true. I didn’t die. But I can only extrapolate so far. People with comorbidity, with both anxiety and other mental health issues and addiction issues, will have their own experience. Benzos might relieve enough of the right pain to make other recovery possible. This is why it is important to let recovery have its own shape, and to avoid writing a bible of recovery.

The interaction between opioid users and drinkers and pill-poppers brought this home to me. I don’t ever do overdose drugs, and I didn’t understand, at first, why someone would want to be hooked on Suboxone after getting off of heroin. But somebody else couldn’t understand me being addicted to benzos.

“That shit is so light,” he said. I didn’t qualify for the rollerball vibes of addiction, apparently.

That’s where benzos land, is this netherworld where neither the junkies nor the doctors take you seriously. And because this particular addiction is so tied to your perception of it, the outside diminishment is a huge part of why it takes forever to start unwrapping the addiction. 

Drugs & Alcohol

My Xanax Prescription Put Me Into a Spiral of Addiction

In class, in extracurriculars, and even in my friendships, I always did more than was necessary, and reveled in the fruits of my labor: high grades, incessant high praise and the admiration of my peers. But none of this was for its own sake. Each extra mile I went made me feel a little closer to earning my right to be there as a Black girl in a predominantly white institution.

All my life, I have attended prestigious, white institutions, and all my life I have excelled in them. Racking up accolades for academic achievement, leadership positions and clubs, I did everything right. But all of my moves were practiced and intentional. Both the dopamine hits of approval and the sweet anticipation of working hard to taste the fruits of my labor felt like an adrenaline rush I was in the middle of all the time.

Looking back, this was neither anticipation nor adrenaline. It was anxiety.

I was always restless. Inactivity felt like a cardinal sin; rest was out of the question. Any time not spent chasing excellence was wasted, and I didn’t want to prove that the assumptions people made about me—that I was there to fill a quota, that I was less qualified and less sophisticated than they were—might be accurate.

And it wasn’t all in the pursuit of vanity—it felt like my responsibility. I had heard it all my life: a chorus of voices telling me how proud I was making everyone, what a good example I was. My success was the success of my family, my extended family and my community—it takes a village, after all. They saw themselves in me, and saw my success as their own. My excellence disproved their own self-doubt, too, and reassured them that their internalized notions about Blackness and their own worth were wrong.

So, having been raised with the weight of my “potential” impressed upon me, it was a given that the consequences for not living up to it would not be personal, but dire for the whole community. I carried that burden for years, making all the right moves, getting into all the right schools, reading all the right books and talking with the best of them. “Don’t waste it,” everyone told me, and that propelled me higher and higher up the social hierarchy, fueling my adrenaline and anxiety with each rung.

Yet, as I forayed further inside these circles, they became more complex. I acclimated to the correct cadences, I learned to recognize status symbols and tried to acquire the few I could. Yet the more I tried, the further away I seemed.

There was always something more to be gained, I finally realized—some other mantle to reach. Even if I got the highest grades, people saw me as a scholarship case. Even if I wore the right clothes, carried the Longchamp bag and bought the Moncler coat, the status symbols were wasted on me. At work, people were surprised by my eloquence but still underestimated my ability. I felt like an imposter and no one was mistaking me for one of them. For all my trying, and even my successful attempts, I felt like I was playing a game of catch-up, hoping to reap some vague rewards of outward approval. 

The dissonance between my home community’s perception of my success and the fraud I saw in myself only deepened my imposter syndrome. Suddenly, I felt different than the people at home, and was othered by the people at school. My isolation meant I had no one to turn to, and the fear of disappointing the people who had supported me and nurtured my potential made me feel stuck, hopeless.

So I kept climbing the ladder. I got into a good college. I spent the summers doing prestigious internships where I was, again, almost always the only Black person, or one of very few. By all accounts, this was making it. I tried to feel satisfied by my achievements but they never felt tangible, as though resting on my laurels, even for a second, would break them. My place in these privileged spaces always felt precarious, and my paranoia was taking its toll. Afraid to be exposed for the fraud I still felt I was, I worked and worked and worked in an attempt to prove myself.

It was inevitable, my burnout, and with it my disillusionment of the systems I had been taught to revere. Why was I working myself to exhaustion when no matter how hard I tried, I was still just the Black girl? And why was I so desperate for the approval of a system I knew was rigged?

The 1:1 value I had placed on my self-worth and production output was a direct function of the capitalist system I know to be flawed and embroiled in white supremacy. Basing my value on my acceptance by elite institutions, from boarding schools, to private colleges, to prestigious companies, was not really validating my community, but validating the hierarchies that oppressed my community. All my work had not been in service of myself, but in service of the institutions which had succeeded in making me feel like I was inherently “less than”—the very function of racism.

In an embodied way, I had given myself to racist institutions in the name of progress and being a credit to my community and my race. And this outdated lie that Black excellence is defined by success in established systems is perpetuated relentlessly. From news highlights on “first Black” milestones, to award shows and the entertainment industry, giving Black artists tiny morsels of recognition while exploiting their output and aesthetics for monetary gain, we’re taught to appreciate these moments of recognition and hunger for them as I had.

However, my experience within the upper echelons—befriending the children of dukes and billionaires, working for internationally recognized names and institutions—proved that there was no space for me there. Marginalized groups are always going to be othered by elite institutions, which were built to advance the white heteropatriarchy and continue to oppress and gatekeep other communities. My place there had only served as an example of adherence, that if one were to work within the system, they would be rewarded.

But after I realized I was working fruitlessly at the expense of my mental health, I quickly realized that I was working at the expense of my community, too. To be a credit to our race is to resist the notion that we need to prove our worth measured against whiteness. To advance my community is to dismantle the systems that I was embroiled in. 

Learning to reject the narrative I had been taught took years of self-doubt, isolation and tireless, thankless work. Finally, through introspection about my values, I realized that the excellence I was striving for was actually leading me away from Black liberation and activism, and further inside the broken system at the expense of my mental health. So many of us are stuck in this cycle but it's time we get out. It may have taken burnout and breakdown for me to get here, but I’m glad I did.

Now I am learning not to look for approval in my work, my output, my purported “success.” I find fulfillment in engaging in my community in a meaningful way, and reading, working and organizing towards liberation.

Black Voices

The Pressure of Black Excellence Was Bad for My Mental Health

Of all the horrors going through my mind during my brief imprisonment at a “behavioral health facility,” perhaps the most terrifying was the thought that I might end up swallowed by the “mental health” system forever. No job. No family. No kids or grandkids. No purpose. Nothing to look forward to except endless drugs and sedation. No growing old or retiring in the countryside. Just a zombie-like existence locked up and medicated in a nuthouse. Forever. 

Those three days of torture, euphemistically described as an “involuntary examination” in an insane asylum, were without question the most horrific of my entire life. Nothing has ever terrified me in that way, before or since. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything that even comes remotely close. It was three days of hell, and even that doesn’t do it justice. 

Pray that you never end up in one of those ghastly places.   

Before I tell you the details of what it was like inside, some background on how I ended up trapped there is in order. The story is as nutty as anything you’ve ever heard. And without getting into all the details, I’ll tell you that even I don’t fully understand what happened, or why. It was surreal, and I remember it like it was yesterday.

It all began toward the end of my time in college. Some friends and I—at least I thought they were my friends—started a relatively successful and influential college newspaper. As we grew, and started looking under more rocks, we stumbled on some extremely serious crimes being perpetrated by powerful people in local government: Crimes that people would kill to conceal.   

One day, I received a strange phone call from a man claiming to be a local Freemason. I had never heard from him before, and I never heard from him again. But he said he was my “friend” and was just calling to warn me that I was in danger due to what we were working on at the newspaper. Basically, he said that if I didn’t stop, unnamed people would either kill me, get me locked up in jail, or have me thrown into a mental institution. He said not to bother calling the cops. They were in on it, too.  

As a 20-year-old college student and a baby Christian, this was all absolutely terrifying. I called my dad. He recommended calling the cops, but I never did—they were supposedly in on it, what the heck good would that do? Eventually, I started getting extremely concerned, perhaps even paranoid. The lack of sleep, from a combination of too much Adderall and too much work, didn’t help matters. And even though there is some mental haze surrounding it, to this day, I’m absolutely convinced that these local criminals of the vilest sort were, at the very least, trying to intimidate me.

At some point, after a trip to Europe during which I thought people were following me, it became difficult to know what was real and what was just a figment of my imagination. Upon my return, in a stupid effort to try to cover my ass from the people supposedly out to get me, I pretended like I was now working with various federal law-enforcement agencies and even Interpol.  

Returning to my college town following the whirlwind trip through multiple European countries—including a stop in Scandinavia to see my future wife, who thought I was losing my mind when I told her what was going on—I shared my troubling experiences with my partners at our college paper. I also shared my bullshit story about working with the feds and Interpol with them, and even told them that I would defend myself with force if somebody tried to take me down. (What a tough guy.) That was a huge mistake.  

Suddenly, a couple of sheriff’s deputies showed up at my friend’s apartment asking for me. Right away, I identified myself. And then, like an idiot, I shared my bullshit story with them, too. All I could think about was the phone call warning me about my fate if I did not back down, and so my assumption was that this was it, I was doomed. Desperately trying to bullshit the deputies, I told them that I was on a mission for unnamed federal and international agencies to root out a criminal conspiracy in the area, and that journalism was merely my cover story. 

They didn’t believe me. In fact, they thought I was nuts. And because I had guns in my truck, and refused to provide any evidence that I was actually working with any legitimate law-enforcement agency, they asked me if I would consent to a psychiatric exam. “No way,” I told them. “Let me talk to the sheriff so we can clear this all up.” 

Long story short: They put handcuffs on me and took me in under a state statute, allowing a person to be held for a few days for an involuntary mental health exam if it is believed the person may be a threat to themselves or others. The ride in the back of the patrol car felt like it took forever. I was sure I was being taken to the nuthouse, just like the creepy “friend” on the phone had promised would happen. 

The intake clerk demanded everything from me when I arrived—including my necklace and rings. At every step of the way, I demanded that I be allowed to speak with an attorney, frantically quoting federal statutes I had memorized about the deprivation of rights under color of law being a major federal crime. I think it scared them. They finally let me call a friend who was a legal expert, and I told him my bullshit story, too. He contacted my family and let them know, which may have been what saved me.  

Because I arrived late at night, the orderlies took me to my shared room without being seen by a shrink first. I would not get to see a psychiatrist until the next day. Trying to sleep in a situation like that is like trying to sleep on a nest of fire ants while covered in peanut butter—it’s absolutely, positively impossible. Another sleepless night, my mind racing, imagining every horrific scenario possible. 

The next day, I met with a psychiatrist. He read my intake report and asked me about it. Thinking he was in on the effort to get me, I had nothing to say other than I wanted to be let out, that there was nothing wrong with me, my rights must be respected, and I fully intended to pursue justice as soon as I got out of there.   

Soon after, he concluded I had bipolar disorder and prescribed Zyprexa for me, a powerful anti-psychotic. Thinking it would paralyze me and allow these creeps to do whatever they wanted, I refused to take anything. (To this day, I believe the disorders and diagnoses used by psychiatrists are even bigger bullshit than my story about working for the feds.)

In fact, after learning years later how these alleged “disorders” were invented—psychiatrists literally get together and vote on this crap, and if there are enough votes, they add it to their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—I could not believe anybody could take this seriously. Scientology and I have virtually nothing in common, but its exposure of psychiatry’s lunacy is its broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day moment.

The power dynamics in the nuthouse were unlike anything I ever experienced in my life. And I believe people need to learn more about this abusive system immediately. 

There was a very clear hierarchy. At the top were the psychiatrists, who held unlimited and total power over the lives and fates of those at the lower rungs. They could set you free. Or they could lock you up forever. I think the power gets to their heads, at least for a lot of them. 

Under them, the orderlies. A lot of them were drunk on power, too. If you resisted their commands, you could find yourself tackled, locked up and even pumped full of sedatives that were the equivalent of a mental straightjacket. There was a kind nurse that I still remember, but other than that, it was horrific. It made me think of the infamous Milgram experiment in which volunteers were willing to zap people. Prisons probably have similar dynamics, though I couldn’t tell you for sure. Similar hierarchies existed among those trapped inside. 

There was one evil, giant guy in there, who was very clearly friendly with the orderlies and seemed to have lots of special privileges. He really freaked me out. Other patients warned me about him. The word was that he was in there voluntarily because it gave him access to “fresh meat.” Apparently he could come and go as he pleased. Even though nobody told me explicitly, I assumed he had been abusing my roommate, who never said a single word the whole time I was in there.  

The entire ordeal was freaky beyond belief. And thanks to that phone call, and the attitude of the psychiatrist, I was concerned that I might end up trapped in a hellhole like that facility forever. Eventually, one of the other young guys trapped in there explained to me what the secret was to getting out: Just agree with the shrink on everything and throw yourself at his mercy. So I tried that the next day. It worked like a charm, and my discharge papers were prepared shortly after that.  

As part of that agreement, though, I finally took one of the pills the quack had prescribed for me to show my submission to his “authoritay,” in the immortal words of Eric Cartman. The only thing I can compare that pill to is a (temporary, thank God!) mental lobotomy. It left me completely incapacitated. It was like slowing your brain down to a snail’s pace.

Getting out was the greatest feeling in the world. It may have helped that my dad knew someone on the board of the company that ran the facility. But I still think the real trick to getting out was just agreeing with the chief quack.   

The story has another twist. It was not shadowy conspirators who called the cops and got me thrown into that hell, it was my supposed friends and colleagues. When I finally found out they’d called the cops, it was a devastating realization, and heartbreaking, too.   

To this day I suspect ulterior motives: They had already made clear that they wanted to seize control of the newspaper from me. There had been an increasing divergence in our views. My two top deputies were homosexual libertarians, and even though I was also a libertarian, I had become a Christian. They wanted to promote the LGBT agenda with the paper. I wanted to promote the Bible.  

After I got out, we found out that our ad sales director had been sabotaging our ad sales. Not long after that, he asked me if I wanted to join Freemasonry—a secret society that supposedly doesn’t even invite people to join. Obviously, I said no. 

Perhaps I’ll never know the full truth about everything that happened in that ordeal, or why. To this day, I still don’t pretend to fully comprehend it all. But God used it in remarkable ways. And it taught me some very valuable lessons. Starting with: Avoid the psychiatric industry and their Big Pharma co-conspirators at all costs.   

It has become fashionable to fret about how the homeless problem could supposedly be solved simply by building more mental hospitals and locking up more people in them. But after spending a few days in one, I can say ending up in a place like that is a fate I would not wish on my worst enemy.  

I still wonder how many people locked up in insane asylums are saner than most of us on the outside. Probably tons—maybe most of them. How many beautiful minds have been rotted out by poison masquerading as medication will never be known, but I bet it’s a whole lot. 

What I do know for sure now is that the mental health system is absolutely, positively, batshit crazy. I know some people claim to have benefited from the services of psychiatrists. But as far as I’m concerned, the whole field is a bunch of quackery, if not a giant criminal operation to peddle dangerous drugs and make big bucks. 

My advice: Avoid it at all costs. Open up a Bible instead.

Goosebumps

Featured

I Was Wrongfully and Involuntarily Committed to a Psychiatric Hospital

I was 14 years old when the priest put his hands down my swim shorts and diddled my dick.

I was at the shallow end of a very large indoor swimming pool. The water reached slightly above my navel.

The pool was at a seminary, the place where young men go to study to be priests. Mine was a “minor seminary,” a combination high school and junior college, something not much seen these days but popular in the mid-20th century. It was far away from my home in Colorado, yet the place where I had decided to go live and study.

I wanted to be what he was, a priest. Today was my first day.

He waded up to me from the deeper water. When he was a few inches away, he slid both his hands down past my waistband. He placed his palms facing him so that he could pull my suit toward him and get in deep. Then, like someone twanging a tuning fork, the middle three fingers on his right hand did their business.

I remember everything: the water was warm; the air, humid; it was summer; the other boys gamboled all over the rest of the pool and its deck; the wall-high windows to the west had been rolled open; the noise stopped.

I remember that he wore black swim shorts, same color as mine; he was a big man and, I thought at the time, a lot older than I. Right in front of my face was his left nipple and I remember, as if it were a minute ago, staring at the many teeny bumps rounding his crimson aureole.

He chatted me up the whole time, asking me where I was from, how I had traveled there, what the train ride was like. I gabbed back, but I didn’t look up at his face; I just locked on that nipple.

I remember seeing words, but inside the back of my head, as if a news ticker were scrolling around a building: “This is a first. Strange, not sure how."

“But it must be okay; he’s a priest.”

At that time in my young life, and in the Catholic culture in which I lived, priests had an exalted dignity, enough, it now appears, to have bent my judgment or to have robbed me of my good sense.

How much of either, really, can a 14-year-old boy exercise when in such thrall?

Another time, five years later, summer again, the end of the last day of my seminary time. The priest took me to the train depot from which I was going to depart to return to Denver. It was very early morning, quite dark; the air was sticky.

I sat down on the left end of one of those pew-like wooden benches that train stations have, the kind with tall backs and ends like an armchair’s. The priest sat down next to me and rammed himself up against my right side, pinning me, then turned a bit and stuffed his right hand down into my pants and crotch.

He fondled my two 19-year-old balls, rolling them around in his palm, his fingers a sea anemone.

His breath was dank with alcohol as he leaned into my right ear and he asked me, “Do you want to go to Confession?”

For the first time in five years, I pulled his hand away from my body. I said, “No.”

In between those two days, the bookends of my time there, the priest touched me many times. Tousles of my hair; a palm on my shoulder; fingers on the rear of my neck. I thought that they were gestures of affection.

During those five years, I remember three times, three nights, when he asked me into his small room. He pulled me to him, the two of us falling onto his twin bed. He slobbered me with awkward kisses, his lips whiskeyed wet.

At least once a month, I went into that same room to seek counsel from him—he was what was called my “spiritual director”—and I would sit opposite him, his desk our DMZ. While we talked, he often would keep both his hands below, masturbating it looked like.

We boys slept in large dormitories, 70 beds in rows, with low nightstands separating each.

One night, when I was 16, I awoke, on my back. My blanket and cover sheet had been pulled down; so, too, had my pajama bottoms.

The priest was standing looming over me. My bed was near the exit lights and he and his black cassock eclipsed them so that the silhouette was starless.

He had jackson pollocked all over me; I was splotched with ejaculate.

The priest died in 2008. He had a name, of course; I simply do not say it. Saying a man’s name gives him presence; it may give him power. In my time, I have had enough of both of the priest’s.

Also, I do not say his name because to do so would identify not only him but also him as a member of a group of priests, what is called, in the Roman church, an “order” or “congregation” of priests. Such, for example, are the Jesuits, or the Franciscans, though neither of these was his.

The great number of the priests with whom I went to school, and of whose congregation I had wished to become a member, were—and are—good men, doing good work. They are not he.

However, whenever I see a Roman collar, my stomach seizes up and my breathing tightens. Likely, the man whom I see wearing the collar thinks me no harm, means me no harm. It is neither fair nor just to partner one priest with all priests. True, many priests have sinned, yet, like all of us in our sinning, each has sinned of his own accord.

Today is close to 50 years to the day when the priest took me to the train depot. For the past half-century, I have heard but one response—only one, or its synonyms—by anyone, anywhere, in any medium, to any story of sexual abuse by a person in power over another person: “That is awful.”

But, in what lies the awfulness? What is so awful about the touching?

Many men and women say that, in their lives, the long-term mental health effects or results of physical abuse are what’s awful. They point out their depression or anxiety, their drug abuse, or how they suffer from PTSD or sexual dysfunction, or, even, how they themselves may have gone on to abuse others.

As for me, during the years since the priest took me to the train depot, I’ve undertaken to kill myself three times (1984, noose; 1996, fire; 2011, car meets wall). I drank gallons of alcohol; blew many an eight-ball of cocaine; been through three rehabs. I’ve been foreclosed on, gone bankrupt, lost work, made many a mistake, fallen many a time.

Yet my life these past 50 years doesn’t collapse into merely these bleaknesses, that pain.

During that same time, I’ve also written—pretty well, I’ve heard—close to 5,000 pieces for magazines and newspapers; taught thousands of people in hundreds of classes and seminars, at schools of my own devising and at prestigious universities; for it all, I’ve received awards, plaques and kudos.

I was 28 years in a marriage with the best person ever to have happened to me; we’ve raised a fine young man. I also became honest with who I am, as a male, opened the closet door, and forged a life of my own.

I’ve done many kindnesses to many people, given, shared, helped, cared; I’ve been a good man.

After thinking a lot about these 50 years, I’ve come to believe that both these sets of a life—the detestable as well as the admirable—have warred with each other to define me. The war was over whether I felt that I was a person or not.

We call our early years “the formative years.” I spent five of those years at the seminary, in the presence of the priest, his power and his touching me.

Because I respected the idea of who and what a priest was, how he treated me mattered to how I felt about myself. Because he treated me—and hence defined me—as an object, something to be manipulated or used, that is how I felt about myself, as a thing. I was a mere thing.

I do not know how things feel (an odd set of words) but over the years I—this guy—felt, in turns, low, dirty, like a pile of shit, worthless, “just there,” damaged goods, anything but forward-looking, or glad to be around for the next minute, or pleased with accomplishment.

On the other hand, when I knew and know myself, inside myself, in my heart, to be not-a-thing, but in fact a person, I told and tell myself that I can do what I choose to do, what I want to do, what I might consider to be good, what might move me or others forward in life, what might enrich my life or others’ lives, what might help me and other people to feel that they are persons too.

There is no one triumph to my life, not even mere living itself. Two selves cohabit in me: the injured one who doubts, and the sound one who knows its goodness.

I accept both, one that was made for me, one that I make for myself. They make me me.

Insiders

NSFW

Religion

Five Years of Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: 50 Years a Victim

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

LGBTQ Voices

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

Lord help us: They say it's not polite to talk about religion or politics, but—hey—we've already talked politics, haven't we? Prayer's up.

I am a fairly levelheaded person, so it took a lot for me to fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories at first. But the pandemic and all the events that have followed have sent me straight into the open arms of online conspiracists. 

The downward spiral usually goes like this: Something newsworthy comes to the surface. It doesn’t sit right with me, so I head to Twitter to see what the more sensible minds are saying. Someone will mention a conspiracy theory, so I instantly head to TikTok to get more information about the theory—because that’s super logical. After watching a few videos, I Google the event, the people involved and the ensuing theory to fact-check for plausibility. When things start to check out, I wallow in despair for a while. I then talk myself out of it and convince myself the theory can’t be true.

Then, the same cycle continues a few days later with a new theory.

This spiral recently happened with the cost of living increase in the U.K. Inflation is bollocks: The price of petrol is unbearable; a trip to the supermarket bankrupts me; and Thor only knows how I’m going to heat my house this winter.

Logically, I know many things to be true that would explain inflation. There was a pandemic that essentially shut the world down. China, where most of our supplies come from, is still in a bit of a slowdown. There’s a war between Russia and Ukraine, two of the biggest exporters of wheat. Global warming has ruined a good few essential crops. Oh, and the whole economy setup is more fragile than a vintage china teacup. I’m no economist and I don’t really know how it all works, but could there be an argument that globalization wasn’t really the best tactic? I fully believe that the government can do better.

At this point in my personal spiral is when some random person on Twitter mentions it—the conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories: the Great Reset.

Now, this theory wasn’t plucked from thin air. The Great Reset plan was discussed at the January 2020 World Economic Forum summit, but the plan shares very little in terms of details. It’s intentionally vague, but the premise seems to offer world leaders and wealthy corporate heads of pharmaceutical, food, oil and technology companies a role in global governance. Allegedly, each of these people would be considered stakeholders in the global economy and would therefore be answerable only to each other.

You don’t need to be a seasoned conspiracy theorist to see that that’s fucked—or to see how it became a breeding ground for conspiracy. Theorists took to online forums and social media apps to express concern, speculating that the Great Reset has been in play for a long time and that COVID and its long-lasting economic pitfalls have been planned and manipulated.

What’s scary is, for once, everything the conspiracy theorists are saying now seems credible.

The U.K. is experiencing its highest inflation in 40 years at 9.4 percent, and the U.S. isn’t too far behind at 9.1 percent. If you were trying to manipulate the economy, how would you drive inflation up even more? Product shortages—which seem to be never-ending lately. Some conspiracists even claim that employees of shipping companies are being told to delay the export of containers.

Yes, China's slowed production, shipping issues and the war in Ukraine are causing delays, but are these all part of a bigger plan? Is this all intentional? Compared to the flat-earthers and the lizard people, the Great Reset is perfectly logical—which I think actually makes it worse.

So here I am, Alice in Wonderland-style falling down this rabbit hole, because when big companies like AstraZeneca and Amazon get involved with world leaders and magnates like Bill Gates, there’s cause for concern.

Admittedly, I’m still trying to talk myself out of this particular hole.

It helps assuage my concerns that not every foreign government seems to be following the same process. Some still appear to be making decent decisions, like Finland, for example.

All these current happenings might actually be knock-on effects of COVID, and it could all be one massive coincidence. Recessions do happen; it’s part of an economic cycle. It’s likely that lockdowns have been the sole cause for supply chain delays. And if this were to happen, surely there would be a massive global revolt, right? We, as a freethinking population, wouldn’t allow this to happen, would we?

While I’m going to put my faith in humanity doing the right thing, I’m also going to err on the side of caution. All it takes is for one conspiracy theory to be right to prove that not all radicals are insane.

In all honesty, we do live in a really scary time, a time ripe with conspiracy theories that seem plausible but take it one step too far to be totally believable. The use of technology and artificial intelligence can manipulate any situation. Smartphones are capturing all our data. Phone tapping has already been confirmed, and the ethical lines are already highly blurred there. Maybe I should check Twitter again.

Pop Culture

An Endless Cycle: Trying Not to Believe Conspiracy Theories

As I read the poem I’d written about my trans sister, I didn’t realize it would start a chain reaction of events that would lead me to losing marks on my creative writing M.A. dissertation and my overall grade. But I discovered something more important.

A member of the poetry group suggested I listen to a recent interview about aversion therapy that had been on the radio. A few days later, I tracked down the interview, listening to the guest talk about their experiences of being trans and how their mother coerced them into aversion therapy. It sounded awful, and I wondered why anyone would think it was a good idea to put someone through that ordeal just to make them fit into their rigid idea of being normal.

I delved into websites, books and other recordings to learn more, but nearing the end of my creative writing M.A., I had to decide what to write about for my dissertation. This had to be a 15,000-word story, an extract of a work-in-progress or a collection of shorter fiction. I decided I could combine wanting to learn more about aversion therapy into it.

I kept the idea of a man being coerced into therapy by his mother, but I chose my character to be gay instead of trans. I created two timelines. One followed this character set in the modern-day. The other followed a doctor who married a woman, despite being gay, in the 1980s. He wanted to hide his sexuality and took a job at a private clinic, standing by for years as he witnessed the barbaric way gay men under his care were treated. Eventually, the two characters met.

Although aversion therapy doesn’t take place in hospitals, I came across several articles to confirm it did still happen in the U.K., where the story was set and where I lived. So I set my story in a place that the characters referred to as a private clinic; it didn’t follow any of the conduct you would expect at a reputable place.

I sent the first draft to other students to critique while I read and critiqued their work. Several of them said the recent timeline was unrealistic because aversion therapy doesn’t happen anymore. I doubted myself enough to reread the articles, which confirmed it did and quelled my concerns. After that, I explained the research I had done and the sources I had found, receiving great feedback from my tutor on the summary and easing any more worry. 

After submitting my dissertation, I waited patiently, eventually opening the fateful email and seeing the mark, a few points away from getting a 2.2. (Here in the U.K., nobody cares about a grade lower than 2.2, even though 2.1 or better is the preferred grade.) Then, I read the feedback. My first thought was how unfair it was. The brief comments stated I should have set the whole story in the ’80s because aversion therapy doesn’t exist anymore. It was impossible to know exactly how many marks this wrong assumption had lost me, but it was likely I would have gotten a 2.2 if they hadn’t deducted them for it.

The disappointment of studying part-time for two years only to see my hard work wasted quickly turned to something else. I kept thinking about the fact that several educated people thought aversion therapy no longer happened in the U.K. I had lots of news articles saved on my computer saying otherwise, and I’d read about people being raped in an attempt to “turn them straight.”

I heard stories of acts that could only be described as torture and would be inhumane if they were being done to an animal. In fact, when animals are treated badly, campaigners often fight to get the perpetrators to stop, and it usually gets featured in the media. So why weren’t more people talking about this? Why weren’t they protesting? Why wasn’t it dominating the news? It’s difficult to know exactly how many people have been forced into aversion therapy because not everyone talks about it. But even a small number is too many.

That’s when I realized that outside of the LGBTQ+ community, most people weren’t aware of aversion therapy—either at all or, just like the students and tutors in my course, they assumed it no longer happened. If this were true, it would explain why there wasn’t more attention and outrage around it.

As aversion therapy was debated in Parliament, I closely followed the news, which was difficult to find unless you knew where to look. Though the government has now agreed to ban it, it doesn’t mean it will end instantly. I believe there is still a lot of campaigning that needs to be done, and people need to be made aware that it still goes on today. For that to happen, people need to come forward with their own personal stories, and the media needs to stop gatekeeping and open up the floodgates to give them a platform to inform the wider public. It’s not just happening in the U.K. but in the U.S. and other countries around the world.

When I look at it that way, the grade for my creative writing M.A. doesn’t seem as important as it did in those first moments of disappointment. The qualification still helped me gain a couple of opportunities, like the regular freelance work I picked up last year (and still do now), and no matter the grade, I still have the knowledge from studying. I just tell people I have the qualification and passed, but hardly anyone ever asks about the degree classification anyway. If it does come up, it gives me an opening to start a conversation about aversion therapy.

The important takeaway is that I learned more about people who are mistreated for being anything other than straight. It’s made me want to share this knowledge with other people and help to make a positive change. The more people outside of LGBTQ+ community are made aware of aversion therapy—and that it still happens—the more they can do to amplify the voices of those who have been (and are still being) subjected to it.

Aversion Therapy Still Exists

There is a school of thought that says bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was once known, is caused by childhood trauma. I believe this, based on my own childhood experiences. I could fill several books with tales of my life living with this disorder, but I will precis many of the events by concentrating on one or two.

I was the second of two children born to an army officer and the daughter of a banker at RAF St Athan, Glamorgan, Wales. I had a brother who had been brain damaged at birth and was one month short of 11 years older than me. Not long after I was born, he was sent to a public school in Wales by my grandfather on my mother’s side so he could keep a watchful eye on his progress. I, on the other hand, went with my parents to Hamm, Germany. We lived there for a little over three years before returning briefly to my grandparent’s house in Cardiff until my father was posted out to Cyprus. He did further tours of Germany, Aden and Germany again before he was posted back to England when I was almost 11.

There was a culture of heavy drinking in the armed forces in the 1950s and ’60s. When drunk, my father’s mood could often change from good to bad very quickly, and my mother and I were often the brunts of these outbursts. This could be anything from a slap to a punch (and on two occasions, a kicking) as I lay curled up on the floor. One of my earliest memories was being hit and falling into a wall when no more than 3 years old. My mother also drank, and they would often have drunken arguments that lead to violent outbursts. I lived in fear of my father’s drinking, and I would now describe myself as an at-risk child.

When we finally returned to England, this manifested into sexual abuse. An army officer “friend” of my parents groomed me from about the age of 11. He would often travel to see his parents in Swansea, and I, with my parents' blessing, went with him, as he would drop me off at my grandmother’s for the weekend and collect me on Sunday. It was a honey trap I fell into. During these journeys, I was sexually groomed, bought expensive gifts and preyed upon by this man. 

My grandfather had died; my parents were binge drinking on weekends; and I had no real friends in school. I was ridiculed at school as a “squaddie brat,” and these trips became an escape from that life, if only for a weekend. I once approached my father about the abuse, but he had been drinking and I suffered the consequences. “Don’t you dare accuse a fellow officer of such things,” he shouted at me as I was punched to the floor and kicked. My mother tried to stop it and succeeded only by being struck herself.

After my father died of a heart attack in the garden—which I witnessed and was powerless to stop or help—my mother and I moved in with my grandmother in Cardiff, and the abuse stopped. I attended the local high school. My mother was still drinking, and in school, I had made some friends who introduced me to smoking, and I soon discovered the joys of cannabis. What some may see as growing pains lead me to be more rebellious both at home and school. I had begun stealing money and things to sell to fund my new lifestyle. Had anyone cared to look, they would have seen the early stages of mania. Looking back on all that happened to me, I can hardly believe it myself. I feel this was what damaged me.

Later, I scraped through my exams and started at a further education college the following year to study A-levels. One of my friends from school in Cardiff, Richard, had joined me at the college, which made it easier for me to mix with other students. My moods were shifting quite dramatically by now. I would have periods of mania, where I would feel invincible, followed by periods of relative normality and then, deep depression. It got so bad at times, I made several suicide attempts over the years.

I had a grant to the college but the money was soon spent, and my meager allowance from my mother barely covered bus money and lunch at meal times. I started to take money from my mother’s purse, shoplift and commit fraud to buy weed, books and records. I was in a manic state at these times, and it was risk-taking behavior. I convinced myself I had a right to do it and wouldn't get caught—I was too smart for that, in my eyes. I was only finally caught because of a fluke. 

One lunchtime while at college, Richard and I took off in a car with another student, Graham, whom we had gotten to know. He drove a huge Ford Zephyr, which was a very roomy saloon car (I think it may have been his father’s). Our college was in a quiet part of town on the outskirts between Cardiff and Newport, with a few minor roads and tracks in the wild country area behind it—a perfect quiet spot to eat sandwiches, drink Cokes and smoke a joint or two. I had bought a quarter ounce of Moroccan hashish a few days before, so when we parked up at a serene spot slightly down a track from a minor road, we felt safe to roll up a few joints. The car soon filled with smoke, and windows were opened to let it clear. But within minutes of doing so, we saw a police car drive past and immediately panicked. We disposed of the joints and swallowed lumps of the remaining hash as we watched the police car reverse and block us in.

For over four hours, we sat in a police station being questioned by drug squad officers, one I learned later was the head of the Cardiff drug squad. They tried to intimidate us, so I eventually told them I had bought the drugs off “Gingerman,” who I described as tall and lanky, with a frizzy, ginger Afro haircut, selling hash around the Loveit Cafe in Cardiff. He was a fictitious character thought up by hash users just for such an event. The police must have bought my story, as we were finally released on bail and collected by our respective parents. Looking back, the affair was over the top—we had been treated like associates of Howard Marks or Manuel Noriega. Consequently, I spent a rather strange couple of hours in the back of a police car the following Saturday, ready to point out the hapless and fictitious “Gingerman,” who quite naturally didn’t make an appearance. 

A few weeks later, the police informed us they had only recovered about three milligrams of hash in the car, not enough to formally charge us but enough for an official police warning. We had gotten away with it, and I have dined on this story many times since.

Undiagnosed, my life continued this way for many years: skulduggery, petty crime, drugs and risky sex, interspersed with bouts of depression. I thought I was a bad person. I had no idea what bipolar disorder was or its symptoms. I changed jobs often, moving quickly on to the next. I used hash and LSD and drank. I had several girlfriends, until I settled with one girl for quite a few years. Her life with me must have been hell on Earth at times, and we finally broke up after around 15 years together. Manic depression had wrecked my life and destroyed many relationships, but the turnaround started soon after my breakup.

I applied for and went to university in Cardiff. I did a year of astrophysics before coming to my senses and switching to computer science. It was computing that helped me—I had found my dharma, my ability. It saved my life and provided me with a successful career as a computer engineer and later, a firewall engineer. In the final year of study, I met my wife, and though our early years of marriage were rocky, her persistence, love and care encouraged me to get a diagnosis for my condition. When I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder with rapid cycling, I finally had a name for what was affecting me. The diagnosis wasn’t a silver bullet, but it enabled me to find the help I needed and the medications that help me control my symptoms. I am now pretty happy, manage my bipolar disorder and have a daughter and beautiful granddaughter—and meaning in my life.

Bipolar Disorder Almost Wrecked My Life

I grew up as an undiagnosed autistic child; retrospectively, it should have been obvious, given the signs I showed. I was the lonely child always failing to make friends or to reach other social milestones, unable to communicate “adequately,” struggling to understand the theory of mind in others, failing to be organized (like when it came to basic tasks such as how to organize information on a page), obsessively seeming "older" in not having interests that aligned with that of my age group. Having an intense interest in a world outside the limited classroom confines of conformity wins no favors when you are a child or a teenager. 

I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome almost a decade ago, just as it was being taken out of the diagnostic criteria, at the end of a three-and-a-half-year wait. The country I live in has poor provisions for diagnostic services, despite official government guidelines and bias against autistic females. Some territories still use the term; other places now use it as a shorthand for an area on the autism spectrum; others use it not at all. Such a descriptor apparently describes my neurological profile better, determining my level of functioning (ugh) in a “normal society” into one compact and understandable box. This is more than just me being awkward, shy, anxious—this is a neurological difference that I will always have. My disability, as defined by law, invariably shapes my life, and it will never not. 

Around the time I was diagnosed, the concept of “neurodiversity” started to take off, and it was seemingly everywhere. Landmark books and memoirs like NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman and Odd Girl Out by Laura James were reaching a mainstream audience. Yet nobody acknowledged that this was a disability that people like me have, lasting until the day we die.

Many of the accommodations recommended before my diagnosis and during weren’t put in place either. I didn’t get the help I needed until almost five years after my diagnosis. While I struggled in trying to get to grips with my brain, phrases describing me as “the next stage in human evolution” and having a “superpower” just like Rain Man were everywhere. There is a cognitive dissonance in that—to toe the line of being enough while not being enough elsewhere, too much or too little. I was “too much” for help from some organizations because I can speak, but not enough for help elsewhere, like my employment needs. Neurodiversity has been used to deny me the help, support or accommodations I need and am legally entitled to, on numerous occasions. 

I hate “neurodiversity.” And I detest it for the negative impact it has had on my life. By law, I am disabled. Medically, I am disabled. And yet as far as society is concerned, I have yet to be “disabled enough” to be counted as such. Why? 

Granted, the neurodiversity movement began with good intentions, such as taking pride in being different, ensuring healthcare professionals are held to standards of accountability, that we have access to education and so much more. Here were autistic individuals doing it for themselves—not parents co-opting their child’s diagnosis to play into tragedy tropes while making it all about them. In theory, that is a beautiful thing and one to be celebrated. 

In my professional and private life, I have been attacked on numerous occasions. Other autistic people have often said I am not “autistic enough”; I present as being “normal” due to being able to speak, for example. I have sometimes been accused of “faking”—while such individuals try to blanket enforce the idea of “community.” In other words, a group of people who subscribe to an echo chamber of neurodiversity advocacy, who try to enforce such a thing on every other person. I have never been a part of a group, let alone a community—because, ironically enough, that is a part of my diagnosis—and yet I have never been made to feel less a part of anywhere than the community I belong to by proxy of a label. Why do we have to conform to expectations we cannot see to? 

Online, I have seen advocates engaging in bullying, petty squabbles, trolling, “cancel culture.” That is not a community I want to be a part of. There are bigger issues. Even my work colleague recently admitted they don’t see me as autistic, as if that was some sort of compliment—before implying that my communication issues made me weird. They’d previously suggested—and still do—that I was part of the neurodiversity demographic that tries to enforce its view on everybody else, lacking in nuance, all the while acting in a very militant manner. While that’s unfair, the behavior of others can so often unfairly blight others.

Earlier this year, I underwent testing related to another condition that is now recognized as being under the neurodiversity umbrella. This is all over my medical history—enough so teachers, doctors and others had said it was blindingly obvious, they just decided not to test me at the time. I struggle daily with numbers—using them, understanding them, translating them—more so than the norm. When the follow-up to review my results took place, I was sent away on the basis that this was a neurodivergent condition to celebrate, with my different wiring, and no diagnosis. A condition that impacts me was brushed aside, with no real consideration for its impact. You need a diagnosis for any support in the U.K., and that had been denied, despite the inordinate amount of testing, because this was something to be “celebrated,” and I’d ostensibly overcompensated for my issues anyway (which is not the case). I struggle so much, and this is not something you can just train away. It’s serious enough that other people, through observation, consider it to be disabling. Why can’t we just admit to ourselves that it is OK to be disabled, there is no shame in that and that we just need some support sometimes? 

I know of other people not being diagnosed as autistic, usually women, because neurodiversity is something to be “celebrated.” They are in need of support, when they’d usually mask their challenges, as part of the diagnosis. You need a diagnosis to access support you are legally entitled to, however; that is your right. Autistic individuals have a higher rate of suffering from mental health issues. Denying the reason why that could help tackle their problems, in order to aid a celebratory narrative, is terrible. 

Neurodiversity has become factional and is lacking in nuance. Not every autistic person is the same. But we are human beings, too—and ones who need support. 

I’m Autistic, but I Hate 'Neurodiversity'

Several months ago, I was dining with an Italian friend when he told me he appreciated L.A. the most for its floating quality. “It’s a climate primed for dreamers,” he mused as he sipped his martini. A platitude, but I couldn’t help but agree with him. We were seated outside Figaro Bistrot, picking at burnt escargot, watching people stroll by the narrow Los Feliz street. It was nosebleed season, and any perspiration immediately wicked off the body into the dry air. 

He said the pedestrians walk differently in his hometown. “In Milan, there’s a constant bustle. People move with a destination in mind. They don’t seem to do so here.” Once again, I agreed with him. There was an impracticality to their pace. They sauntered by, often with earbuds in, and took up the entire middle of the street. As someone who moved back to California after a stint in New York, this happened to be my biggest peeve with the city; the pedestrian culture here was infuriating at times. But that day, watching my friend watch the street with detached curiosity, it felt novel again. 

Follow Us