This article traces my struggles with psychosis, arrest, psychiatric institutionalization, and recovery. Mobilizing a cathartic approach to autoethnography, I reveal my resistances, resiliencies, oppressions, nightmares, and recovery processes in the mental health system as I became entangled in another, darker reality and tried desperately to escape it. This work is a contribution to the emerging field of Mad Studies that seeks to privilege lived experiences with madness and the mental health system as a way of knowing. I found that doing an autoethnography of the mind helps recover the pieces of a fragmented identity and heals some of the visceral horrors that haunts us through and beyond experiences with mental illness.
© 2020 by The Regents of the University of California
2020
You do not currently have access to this content.