Susan McKeown, Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter and folklorist,
supported her partner through an extreme state. She began a journey to
uncover intergenerational trauma in her family and in the history of her
native Ireland, and was inspired to take poems about madness...
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How can we truly help combat veterans facing the aftermath of war? Is veteran
trauma a sign of mental illness, or a healthy response to violent situations?
Are medications and therapy the answer?
Paula Caplan, author of When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of...
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What’s it like to be a teenager in a psychiatric hospital? What is it like
to be a queer pregnant teenager? Is it true that friends do make the best
medicine? Nina Packebush explores these questions and more in her
groundbreaking debut young adult novel, Girls Like Me. N...
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Is breakdown really breakthrough? Should unhappy people be made to adjust to
a mad society? Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing made a huge cultural impact,
shaping the psychiatric survivor movement and offering a psychological
critique of social conventions in a time of th...
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Is madness breakdown or initiation into a spiritual calling? Crazywise is a
new documentary film that explores the meaning of psychosis from the
perspective of traditional cultures and shamanism. Phil Borges is an award
winning photographer and filmmaker whose work has a...
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Why are so many trauma survivors, especially women, diagnosed
“borderline?” Is the label useful — or sexist and degrading? How can
people who live through intergenerational violence be understood and
supported — instead of discounted and silenced?
Rita Marshall, human r...
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How can seeing visions and hearing voices be transformed into a spiritual
gift for healing? What does the initiation ordeal into becoming a shaman
involve? Gogo Ekhaya Esima was diagnosed with psychosis and confined in
psychiatric hospitals before she became an initiated...
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What is it like to hear voices? Are all voices harmful or can they also be
helpers? What does voice hearing say about the human mind - and the society
we live in? And how can we support people who hear voices? Lisa Forestell has
heard voices since she was a child. She is...
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