First-Person Psychiatric Accounts: A Substack Collection

First-person accounts of mental health challenges and mental healthcare have been a defining part of Psychiatry at the Margins from the start. Many of these guest contributions are among the most widely read and appreciated posts in this newsletter. To make them easier to find, and to invite you to revisit them, I’ve gathered them here in one place. The list follows the order in which they were originally published.

“Psychiatric Survivor” by Lisa Wallace, original art accompanying her guest post

Guest Posts

1. A Psychiatric Survivor Comes to a Place of Understanding. Lisa Wallace.

2. Finding My Way Out of Anti-Psychiatry. Lisa Wallace.

3. I Am Trained to Diagnose Depression, Yet I Overlooked My Own Amidst a Rock Bottom Pregnancy. Colette Delawalla

4. Reflections on the Scottish Mental Health Law Review and Hopes for a Less Coercive Future. Graham Morgan

5. Second-Generation Psychosis: A Brave New World of Recovery. Sarah An Myers

6. Practicing Psychiatry in the Third Space. Helene Speyer

7. Confessions of an Ambivalent Psychiatrist. Susan Mahler (

   Susan T. Mahler, MD
   )

8. Rich Girl Rehab. Sorbie Richner (

   Sorbie
   )

9. Unmeasured Minds. Alex Mendelsohn (

   Alex Mendelsohn
   )

Interviews and other posts where first-person experiences are brought up

1. Acute Religious Experiences as a Way of Seeing Madness. Richard Saville-Smith.

2. Adventures in Personalized Psychopharmacology: A Conversation with David Mordecai

3. Mixed Bag: Diana Rose on Mad Knowledges and Epistemic Collisions

4. Anxiety and the Existential Tradition: A Conversation with Kirk J. Schneider

5. Synesthesia of Distress And Other Stories: A Q&A with Owen Scott Muir (

   Owen Scott Muir, M.D, DFAACAP
   )

6. The Conceptual Muddle of Addiction and Recovery: A Discussion with Carl Erik Fisher (

   Carl Erik Fisher
   )

7. Building Mutual Aid Communities Outside the Clinical Context: Q&A with Cooper Davis

8. The Paradox of Alternative Spaces: Q&A with Sascha Altman DuBrul (

   Sascha Altman DuBrul
   )

9. Cogwheel Souls: Q&A with Sofia Jeppsson on Madness, Fantasy, and Philosophy

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See also… accounts by family members:

• On Burning Your Maps: A Parent-Caregiver Perspective on Mental Healthcare in the US. Joseph Meyer

• The Human Challenge of Schizophrenia. My book review of “Roll Back the World” by Deborah Kasdan

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