Posted on by karin.jervert

Talk: Creativity and COVID: A Lived Experience Perspective

Creativity and COVID: A Lived Experience Perspective” at the Alternatives 2021 Conference. July 10, 2021 at 12PM EST.

The Alternatives conference continues on the legacy of the late Judi Chamberlin, a pioneering leader in the peer rights movement, and is funded entirely through registration fees and donations. “We will be ‘on our own’ again, connecting to the roots of our movement,” said conference chair Anthony Fox. “We will be free and empowered to express our unique voices, to learn from each other in the spirit of self-help, mutual support, and the principles of recovery in action, with the goal of living full and independent lives in the community.”

Read more
Posted on by karin.jervert

Radical Acts of Community Healing and Self-Love

One thing has remained true for me as I’ve reflected on my journey into and out of the psychiatric system. My society—the education system, culture, economy and government that I existed within as a young woman—relied on me to internalize blame for all the ways it had failed me. The unfortunate, and often dangerous, “safety” net for the emotional repercussions of this toxic arrangement was psychiatry. It was psychiatry that then dug deep to nurture this seed of self-blame by planting the identity of the “mental patient.”

Read more
Posted on by karin.jervert

Burning Down the House of Psychiatry During COVID

If there was ever a time to re-evaluate how we as a society deal with human suffering, I assure you, it is now. The particular nature of a pandemic’s mental health effects strains every false narrative and misguided practice of psychiatry. Especially the practice of medicalizing the very human reactions of severe depression and anxiety in response to isolation, deprivation, and suffering, as well as the claim that this response is indicative of chronic psychological disorders.

Read more
Posted on by karin.jervert

Surviving the Bipolar Label

I am a woman who fully identified with the label bipolar for almost 20 years and, according to psychiatry, rightfully earned it with four involuntary hospitalizations. Early on, I was given no other language besides brain disease and unbalanced chemistry with which to understand the altered states and despair I experienced. When I look back honestly on the very recent past, I see that I used the identity of bipolar like a brace around my hard-to-manage mind, to hold it still, to teach it where it could and could not go—where I could expect it to be at any given moment. Even what I could expect from myself and my life.

Read more
Posted on by karin.jervert

De-Weaponizing Empathy

As published in Mad in America

I am not immune to what I call weaponized empathy, which I see as the pure intention of compassion for another tainted with aggression around eradicating pain, pain that could be a source of growth for the sufferer if allowed to arise and pass away without force. I have shut down the suffering of those I love even as a survivor of the particularly lethal form of weaponized empathy that exists in psychiatry.

Read more