When I began this blog in September 2005, I had no idea what I was doing. In some ways, I still don't. But the basic idea is that I am tossing some ideas at the universe. If you like them, cool. If you don't, fine.

I am concerned about the state of mental health care in America and elsewhere. We simply are not getting the kind of results that patients, myself included, were promised 20 years ago at the dawn of the psychopharmacological revolution. Yet that's not what you'll read in the American media and it's not what you'll hear from researchers, most advocates and the pharmaceutical companies. What's more, there isn't much of a free market of ideas in the mental health world--it's pretty much the mental health establishment versus the anti-psychiatry movement. Let me stress that I am not a member of the latter movement.

What I am is a long-time psych patient who has become quite skeptical about where we are with mental health in this country. I believe in accountability and an honest exchange of ideas.

I'm doing this because I am a reporter who's come to find the print form that has sustained me for the last decade is too restrictive in light of the Internet. That's a complicated point and I will make it elsewhere.

But, yes, I am an actual journalist, for what that might be worth in the blogosphere. I am also mentally-ill, having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder (more commonly called manic-depression back then) in 1989. I have been an attentive eyewitness to the psychopharmacological revolution that has swept this nation since about 1990. I have seen and experienced the good. I have seen and experienced the bad. I have lived the in-between.

For the last several years, I have been reporting extensively on mental health issues, locally and nationally, primarily at Seattle Weekly, where I was a staff writer until November 2006. In that time, I have interviewed patients living on the streets, in homeless shelters and in state mental hospitals, as well as patients leading more ordinary lives. I have interviewed researchers and doctors great and small. Adding together my formal reporting work and more informal encounters with patients going back to 1989, I have interviewed hundreds of people with mental illness.

I point that out because it has led me to certain conclusions, some reasoned and some more emotional. But, ultimately, my conclusions still add up to one man's attempt to make sense of mental illness in America. Please read this blog in that light.

As far as fancy stuff like journalism awards go, I won awards from the National Mental Health Association for my newspaper reporting in 2005 and 2006, and have won a half-dozen local and regional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for my reporting on mental illness. In addition, I have won a national award for food writing, and 14 other SPJ awards for government reporting, investigative reporting, science reporting, feature writing and religion reporting.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Everything on this site, except for comments, belongs to me. You can pinch four graphs of text, if you want, to use for posting elsewhere. But you must credit this site and provide a link back to the original post. Anything longer that that and you need to write me for permission.

COMMENTS

I moderate comments. Anyone who in any way derides someone else’s illness and hectors them into irrational behavior will have their comment removed. Next, they will be banned from the site. Everything else goes.

DISCLAIMER

I write a lot about mental illness on this site. I am not a doctor or therapist and I am not giving you medical advice. You and your own doctor know your body, mind and behavior in all their intricacies. I don’t.

What I am trying to do is get Americans of every stripe to think about mental illness in a different way. I am also hoping to get the mentally-ill to think about their own plight in more expansive ways that they will ever hear from their doctor or therapist.