15 Minutes by Katherine Flitsch
* Artwork: “Mirror” by Ann Marie Sekeres “Are you staying here tonight?” Aunt Mary asks me as she takes my hand and pulls me into our pyramid of sol...
Category: Mental Health
The Question of Spilled Milk: A Short Parable by Tracy Ross
I started to think maybe I failed the test, the spilled milk test, that I had answered the analyst’s question wrong and that is why they secured me in a room fo...
7 Minute Read/Aging/Being Body/Childhood/Escape/Family/Girls & Women/Grief/Health/Inspirational/Literature/Loss/Man in The Mirror/Mental Health/Mental Illness/nonfiction/PTSD/Spirituality/Survival/trauma
Savasana by Heather Gemmen Wilson
When I was slim, I communicated with my whole body in large, confident gestures; I enjoyed being front and center. But I’m no longer thin. To deal with difficul...
All That Carry On…: Oktoberfest by Ellen O’Donnell
After August 31, the good mornings and goodnights disappeared. In the push/pull of bipolar, as he muddled through the anhedonia, ambivalence, and anxiety, his c...
7 Minute Read/ACEs/Adversity/Childhood/Family/Fathers/Grief/Literature/Loss/Mental Health/nonfiction/PTSD/trauma
Very Important People by Gina DeMillo Wagner
You want to tell him you wish you could have gone too. That your mother never picked up the pieces. That there was never enough after he left. Not enough love, ...
20 Minute Read/Aging/Alzheimer's/Family/Featured/Funny/Grief/Health/Inspirational/Literature/Loss/Love/Memory/Mental Health/nonfiction/On Memory/personal essay
Debris by Cindy Bradley
After hip surgery, my father’s memory is all over the map. As he recuperates in rehab, he tells us he’s been to Spain, England, Oakland and even Kabul, all in t...
10 Minute Read/2018 Recovery Essay Award Winners/ACEs/Childhood/Family/Health/Loss/Man in The Mirror/Mental Health/nonfiction/On Memory/Regret/writing
How to Write a Healing Story by Author Cameron Shenassa
I have a student who is failing my class. He wants to be writer, but he comes to me and tells me that he can’t write because he is depressed. He is wearing paja...
10 Minute Read/Aging/Family/Funny/Girls & Women/Identity/Literature/Love/Memory/Mental Health/nonfiction
It’s Not Much of a World Without Unicorns by Jillian McKelvey
I think these people mean to say, that my mother with Alzheimer’s, behaves differently from the mother I knew without Alzheimer’s.
3 Minute Read/ACEs/Adversity/Health/Institutions/Literature/Loss/Memoir/Mental Health/MeToo/nonfiction/On Memory/PTSD/Recovery/trauma
Day 4: Mental Health Unit, Providence Hospital, Anchorage by KB Imle
She says she’s got Borderline Personality Disorder. That’s like the worst thing you can have, worse than Bipolar. I feel better being around her because suddenl...