This blog post was inspired by my participation in IDHA‘s December 2020 “Decarcerating Care Fireside Chat.” I am grateful to Jessie Roth, IDHA co-director, for facilitating a rich conversation with my fellow interlocutors Jess Stohlmann-Rainey, Dustin Gibson, and Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu. When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, my first thought is that I wasContinue reading “Decarcerating Perinatal Mental Health & Reproductive Care”
Category Archives: Mad Studies
Thinking with Dyane Harwood: Birth of a New Brain
Although I lived with a bipolar diagnosis years before my own crisis with mania and depression during pregnancy, I was intrigued by both the familiarity and foreignness of postpartum bipolar.* As I began to do more research, I stumbled across Dyane Harwood’s memoir Birth of a New Brain: Healing from Postpartum Bipolar Disorder (2017). TheContinue reading “Thinking with Dyane Harwood: Birth of a New Brain”
Madness & The Intuitive Mind
During this new phase of mastery in managing my mental illness, I have been struggling to make sense of extra-sensory, intuitive experiences I’ve encountered in my stability. In manic and depressive states, I am very sensitive to energy emitted from the “unseen.” I am tuned into the vibrations of the Earth through the weather andContinue reading “Madness & The Intuitive Mind”
The Language of Madness
Since my diagnosis in 2012, I slowly became indoctrinated in the medical model of mental illness which emphasizes a biological basis for “abnormal” behavior. As a person living with bipolar disorder, I learned to categorize my lived experience within diagnostic terms, like manic or depressed, and looked to therapy, psychiatry, and psychopharmacology for a cure.Continue reading “The Language of Madness”
Nadia Naomi Mbonde 