Tiger Beatdown

I’m not sure when I first understood that my brain worked differently from other people’s, and that the feelings I experienced weren’t like the feelings other people experienced. There was no defining moment I can point to, no instance of ‘aha,’ just a slow sense of deterioration, interrupted by periodic visits to counselors and doctors […]

One of the most insidious and commonly repeated tropes about mental illness is that people can bootstrap their way out of it; they just need to ‘try harder’ and ‘stop moaning’ and they’ll magically get better, even if this defies all known knowledge of neurochemistry, human emotion, and psychiatry. There’s tremendous pressure on people with […]