Hi there, welcome to my other blog.
My name is Jane Alexander and I am the author of:‘Possessing Me: a memoir of healing‘, which details my seventeen year battle with mental illness.
During my teens I was institutionalized for mental illness and treated against my will. I did not respond well to the latest and greatest drugs that were going around back in the late ’80s.
For the longest time I didn’t like talking about myself, so therapy (what little I had had) did not work out so well. I caused myself and my family a lot of problems until finally, I pushed really hard to exit this existence with a monstrous overdose. I had a near-death experience and ended up in a brief coma.
As I was recovering from that, I realized that I didn’t have to live my life according to anyone’s expectations. Going to college, having my own family, even deciding on what to do with myself when I grew up was just too overwhelming. I had to take it slow and just try to live one day at a time.
I moved far away from the abusers in my family and everyone that I had hurt or had hurt me and all the haunting memories and started a new life. In time I was able to heal myself of my emotional, mental and spiritual wounds. It was a long and slow process that entailed a gradually increasing stability.
After about five years of living this crazy lifestyle of solitude and mind-body training I cured myself of schizoaffective disorder, which is a combination of a bipolar disorder 1 and schizophrenia, as well as a pretty bad case of PTSD.
The focus of this blog is to discuss the current science underpinning mental health labels. What do we really know about mental illness? What it is it, really? I want to keep an eye on the developing findings in genetics and brain chemistry and the like. I want to be informed and abreast. I want to comment on mental health politics and the latest studies.
I really do not like where we are on right now with kids being diagnosed with bipolar at the age of three and being given antipsychotics. I think this is a crime against children. Their minds, bodies, and spirits are being damaged and enslaved to lifer polypharmacy and there is no good medical or scientific reason for it.
My book Possessing Me: A Memoir of Healing
contact me: janealexander (at) possessingme (dot) com
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