Mental Health Rebekah Frumkin, Kate Gavino, Chelsea Martin, Esmé Weijun Wang

Pickles Taught Me the Art of Self-Preservation

I was not suspended in a timeless brine like my pickles. I was not a stoic javelin of cellulose waiting to strike a bored palette. My answers would not be in rigidity, in control.

Sep 22, 2022
Covid-19, Memory, and Remembering My Grandma

Can I trust the sparse memories in my long-Covid brain? If I don’t record this, will my Frankenstein-ed memories escape, just like Grandma’s did?

Mar 16, 2022
Does Making Predictions Impede the Formation of Memories?

When your brain is presented with a scenario, it makes a decision: Does it file this moment away as a unique event, or slot the information into an existing pattern?

Sep 22, 2021
It Doesn’t Hurt, It Hurts All the Time

What if we thought of emotional trauma the way we do physical: as a wide class of wounds whose healing is unpredictable, whose scars take different forms?

Aug 11, 2020
The Bipolar Nanny Diaries

Shame alley-ooped my fear. I worked with children and I had a mental illness. They were antithetical.

Jun 16, 2020
Either My Anxiety Is Less Acute or I’m Better at Managing It—Which May Be the Same Thing

The psychiatrist said that there were plenty of people whose brains did much the same thing mine was doing. He called it ‘anxiety.’

Jul 24, 2019
Counting to Ten Without Numbers

My dyscalculia turns counting a difficult task. So, to get to know them, I turned numbers into people.

Mar 14, 2019
How I Came to Appreciate the Video Memories I Experience as an Autistic Woman

Knowing and understanding that I’m autistic has given me the strength to experience the excess of empathy that comes from reliving my vivid, video-like memories.

Nov 26, 2018
How Shanties and Songs of the Sea Helped Me Weather the Storm of Depression

The language of depression can be curiously maritime. It comes in waves; it drowns us; it’s the Mariner’s albatross around our necks.

Aug 06, 2018
Nature or Nurture: Insomnia and What We Pass On to Our Children

“How do I teach her letting go, when my hands are still gnarled in the shape of everything I’ve ever lost?”

What to Do with Self-Hate: A Comic

Try to give it to a stranger. Try to feed it to the dog. Marry it.

Jul 09, 2018
Nietzsche and Kanye Don’t Know Shit About My Migraine Pain

“Migraine is deceptive pain. It lies when it begins, and it lies about what it signifies. It signifies nothing.”

May 24, 2018
Treating Migraines: How Women Are Harmed by Gendered Medical Language

I’ve gotten incapacitating headaches since I was a kid.

Feb 06, 2018
Tics of the Saints: On Conversion Disorder, Mental Illness, and Searching for a Voice

On the gendered aspect of conversion disorder, how it might have historically manifest in nuns and mystics, and the strange comfort of being diagnosed.

Jan 23, 2018
Capturing Dementia’s Voice: Postwar Memories Under Siege

If I collect Oma’s memories, if I truly remember my grandmother, I too can retain what is slipping away.

Nov 08, 2017
How to Prepare for an Emotional Disaster: A Comic

Keep a notebook of all the ways things could go wrong so as to curb expectations.

Jul 25, 2017
The Future of Traumatic Memories

Notes on surviving a terrorist bombing.

Jun 01, 2017
Postpartum Tea: Taking Care While Changing Identity

“It is a bewildering and lonely thing to be so attached to another human and also feel so adrift and so alone.”

May 26, 2017
We Need to Recognize Complex PTSD in Order to Treat It

Our communities lack fundamental solutions to the scars of complex trauma.

Apr 26, 2017