Pain and Pastures: By Nancy Scott

“Trauma as I define it is anything that overwhelms the body’s ability to regulate itself. Our flight/flight/freeze response is located in the sympathetic nervous system, marked by elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, narrowed peripheral vision, and tightened muscles that are ready to run or fight at a moment’s notice… I’ve worked as a therapist for about fifteen years now, ‘somatically’ with people like Flora for about ten. I have found that working with the body is essential for resolving traumatic memory.”

Be Excellent To Yourself: By Rene

“It’s been four years now since I hit rock bottom and thought life would never get any better, four years since everything looked black and despairing, and now I’m pretty damn happy. I never knew it was possible to be so consistently happy and resilient — and I purposely am not using the Christianese ‘joyful’ here — I mean happy, not gritting-my-teeth-determined-to-be thankful.”

Help is Worth Getting Because You Matter: By Kierstyn King

“I don’t have to live in suffering like I thought for so long. I didn’t realize that I had been depressed since puberty, with bouts of really really bad rounds of it, until I started taking antidepressants and was introduced to actual emotions and feelings. It was overwhelming at first — I had so many emotions, all of them, I didn’t know what they were, how to name them, or how to deal with them. I just had to sit there and wait and learn what they were.”

I Cannot Write You a Happy Ending, Part Two: By Slatewoman

“Homeschooling and mental illness are a terrible combination. And chances are, if a parent is mentally ill, the child might as well be too — and this cycle can go on for generations. My way of ending it is to not have children. I don’t want them anyway and I would be a terrible parent. But I don’t want to spread my genes and the proclivities that go along with them.”

Recovering…: By Lana Martin

“This dream took place at a point in my life when I was actively confronting my past. I was coming to terms with the physical abuse, the emotional abuse, the spiritual abuse. I was trying to shed the deep shame I had long carried about the way I was homeschooled for eight years. I lived, for the most part, in isolation and received no parental education.”

It’s a Long Road Out of Depression, But There is a Road: By Lana Hobbs

“This is what depression looks like for me. I didn’t recognize it because I didn’t believe in depression… It was years before I finally got help. If you have unexplained sadness, exhaustion, and sickness, please get help. Medication isn’t really ‘witchcraft’ and therapy isn’t ungodly psychobabble. There is help and hope for a healthy mind.”

The Road to Depression: By RD

“When children are raised with the message that if they have faith in Jesus or live their life according to the Bible then they will be blessed, it creates a very false expectation. Anything bad that happens, any misfortune, becomes interpreted as God’s punishment for not being faithful enough, for failing in your walk with him. I’ve seen this illustrated over and over again.”

I Cannot Write You a Happy Ending, Part One: By Slatewoman

“My mom has been bi-polar for as long as I can remember, but she was diagnosed when I was 10. I remember when she started taking medication for it and things got bad. Real bad. This was back before many long-term studies had been done on the medications she was given, and she was given just about every one under the sun between then and now.”

That Selfish Depression: By Quick Silver Queen

“People like my parents don’t understand that mental disorders are actual physical differences in someone’s brain. Most times it can be helped through medication, just like other physical ailments. It has to do with the balance of chemicals and hormones in one’s brain, and that’s nothing you can consciously fix any more than my dad can will away his ankylosing spondylitis.”

I Hope That I Get To See My Sister Again: Elizabeth’s Story

“They also taught us that an illness was God teaching us something, and intervention was only acceptable under dire circumstances. Due to this mentality, we were blind to the mental sickness that was creeping slowly into each and every one of us, accepting it as ‘normal’ and ‘God’s will’.”