Recovery Diaries In Depth

Send us Fan Mail It's hard to imagine what you'd do if you're a touring musician whose primary instrument is the guitar , and you start to lose the use of your hands. It may seem like an incongruous response, but Paul Curreri chose to stop drinking. And it wasn't exactly an intentional choosing of sobriety. It was more, "I'm not drinking today and I'm probably no...

Send us Fan Mail Recovery Diaries in Depth guest Nick Emeigh and our show's host Gabe Nathan are old friends, both of whom live with mental health challenges. They're both passionate, compassionate, vulnerable, and unafraid (while simultaneously being afraid of pretty much everything). That's a lot of what makes them good friends, and so much of what makes this interview a must-hear...

Send us Fan Mail Today, Kayla Ackelson lives, breathes, and thrives through independent expressive, mixed media artistry. But it wasn't always that way. For years, she struggled with incessant worries-- about everything, from swimming to sleepovers, movies, the dark (where people often watch movies), to people she loved dying. Never fear, though; she had maladaptive coping strategies to &quot...

Send us Fan Mail From ages 13-19, Levi Mericle wanted to die, pretty much every day. There was reckless, impulsive behavior, suicide attempts, hospital stays, agonizing torment for Levi and assuredly endless nights of the most intense anxiety possible for his devoted parents, who struggled to understand what was happening to their previously happy-go-lucky boy.  Serious and persistent mental illne...

Send us Fan Mail For decades, Jacquese Armstrong let others write her story. She was labeled, marginalized, medicated, and was essentially given a life sentence by physicians who spent no more time with her than you spend with the clerk at a 7-Eleven. She was told she'd never work. She was told. Now, she tells. And the story she tells is one of boundless creativity , advocacy, a passionate en...

Send us Fan Mail Manndi Maphies lives with obsessive compulsive disorder. It was undoubtedly present in her childhood, where she exhibited behaviors that could be perhaps described as "quirky" but her OCD caught fire following a miscarriage, followed by a new pregnancy. Manndi was, understandably, terrified that she miscarried because of something she "did", and she was absolut...

Send us Fan Mail “If I don’t communicate, I feel like I’m disappearing.”  This is a bedrock principle that guides Sarah An Myers in her advocacy for schizoaffective disorder, her writing, and her life. She refuses to disappear, she refuses to be silent, she refuses to let others speak for her. Sarah An Myers lives with schizoaffective disorder, a mental illness that combines aspects of a thought d...

Send us Fan Mail Erika Nichols-Frazer joins us today as our guest. She's an old friend of Recovery Diaries, having published three essays with us; Lies Mania Has Told Me , A Double-Edged Sword: Facing the Grief of Miscarriage with Bipolar Disorder , and the essay we're privileged to have her read aloud during this episode, Manic MFA: How My Degree Almost Cost Me My Sanity . While Erika i...

Send us Fan Mail Today, Chris Russell is a grounded, hopeful human being who helps others navigate suicidal ideation as a volunteer for the Suicide/Crisis Lifeline. He definitely still has his struggles with symptoms related to his bipolar ii diagnosis, but he is managing his mental health in a way that was inconceivable to him not too long ago, where he was struggling with intense, unmanaged ange...

Send us Fan Mail At a recent conference for health advocates from all across the country, our Executive Director and show host, Gabriel Nathan, was reunited with an extraordinary woman and schizophrenia advocate, Rebecca Chamaa. Years earlier, in around 2015, Rebecca had submitted her very first essay, I Have Schizophrenia , about living with mental illness to Recovery Diaries and Gabe, who had ju...

Send us Fan Mail Javier Ortega Ariza is a compassionate, sensitive writer who has published two essays with Recovery Diaries, including his moving and powerful essay “ Surviving Suicidality To Live In A Wonderful World ” which explores a "last walk" he took after deciding to die by suicide, and his beautiful decision to stay. Javier reads this essay aloud on this compelling episode of ou...

Send us Fan Mail We are so lucky here at Recovery Diaries to have an international community of special, sparkly people coming to us to share their mental health recovery stories. Today's guest on the show is Nicci Attfield , who lives with anxiety and add. Nicci was born in the UK, and is currently living in South Africa. She has published two personal essays with us, (as has her husband, Ja...

Send us Fan Mail Jasmin Pierre is the creator of The Safe Place, an award-winning app that offers free and affordable resources centering on Black mental health. Jasmin created The Safe Place for so many reasons-- because, when police respond to psychiatric emergencies and the person in crisis is black, the results can be deadly. Because of the pervasive and dangerous philosophy in many Black home...

Send us Fan Mail Officer James Jefferson, an 18-year police service veteran and wellness coordinator in Canada, is done with the "blue wall of silence." He speaks openly, candidly, honestly, and earnestly about mental health issues in law enforcement, and the series of events that almost resulted in him killing himself with his service weapon. Why? To help other officers who are struggli...

Send us Fan Mail Sheri Heller is many things. She is a psychotherapist, a coach, an interfaith minister, and a supremely talented writer. She is also a trauma survivor, having been raised in the chaos and pain of a home where her mother was suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Sheri wrote the piece, “An Orphan’s Memorial to Her Dying Mother” and sent it to us, years ago. Our filmmaker, G...

Send us Fan Mail The most dangerous period for a veteran isn't during during enlistment, but that first year after leaving the military; and the danger almost exclusively comes from the self; a severely elevated risk for suicide. In fact, the suicide rate for non-combat veterans is higher for those who have been in active combat. When Navy veteran Taylor Grieger survived a suicide attempt, he...

Send us Fan Mail Elizabeth Ann Devine is a non-binary author living with ADHD, PTSD, OCD, and dissociative identity disorder. They have been twice published on Recovery Diaries, and we were delighted to welcome them onto Recovery Diaries in Depth to share their powerful journey of using writing as both survival mechanism and healing practice. From early childhood, Elizabeth found sanctuary in libr...

Send us Fan Mail From her earliest memories growing up in Pakistan—where her dream of pursuing music seemed impossible for a woman—to the hallowed halls of Harvard University where overwhelming expectations led to debilitating burnout, Dr. Shumaila Hemani reveals the institutional and cultural pressures that shaped her experience. The expectations of perfection, unrelenting pressure, and cold acad...

Send us Fan Mail "Love is what gives us the strength to balance the anger." It seems improbable that a human being who has shouldered the weight of so much trauma, so many secrets, so much shame could come to this conclusion, but this is part of what makes Dr. Deborah Derrickson Kossmann such a powerful writer, and such an unshakable empath.  In this episode of Recovery Diaries in Depth,...

Send us Fan Mail NAMI asserts that the average length of time between onset of mental health symptoms and reaching out for help is eleven years. That is an excruciatingly long time to be living with mental health challenges without professional help, and the reasons behind why many people wait so long are varied, complex, and understandable. If you are one of those people living in anguish or desp...

Send us Fan Mail People do all kinds of things to bring attention to mental health and suicide prevention. There are people who have ridden bicycles nude around the United Kingdom. Some take ice baths and do push-up challenges. A few years ago, the host of this very podcast filmed himself driving his 1963 Beetle, emblazoned with the Suicide/Crisis line on the rear window, up and down the East Coas...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when your own mind becomes your greatest fear? When intrusive thoughts flood in that feel completely alien to who you really are? In this intimate conversation, writer Pinar Tarhan takes us deep into her experience with Pure Harm OCD – a misunderstood subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder characterized not by handwashing or organization, but by terrifying unwanted...

Send us Fan Mail Florence Mukangenzi is a doctor in Rwanda who lives with mental health challenges, including anxiety. In 2017, back when she was a medical student, she wrote a beautiful essay for our site called " Playing Hide and Seek with a Demon: My Struggle with Anxiety. " In 2019, she flew across oceans to join other women from around the world for a unique women's writers ret...

Send us Fan Mail Jason Schreurs calls himself a “punk rock weirdo”, but he’s also a mental health group facilitator, writer, creator, advocate, podcast host and someone who lives with bipolar disorder. You could say that bipolar and punk come together in a unique and exciting way in Jason’s life and that “scream therapy” (the name of his podcast) is just one of the ways that Jason keeps and stays...

Send us Fan Mail Hannah R. Goodman is busy: she has a Substack , she’s a writer and novelist, she is a therapist, she’s a spouse and a mother. She has a lot going on in her life; and a lot going on in her head, too—as she’s very open about—particularly “pure O” and generalized anxiety disorder. There’s so much going on that it was surprising that she found time to spend an hour with us to sit down...