Syd The Kid’s Reviews > The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness > Status Update

rereading this gem and ouchie

“Though many miles away, I had continued to love and value these people who had stayed my constant friends. And I always believed that they felt the same about me. And now we could add Will to the mix. Will, my husband.”

“When you have cancer, people send flowers. When you lose your mind? They don’t.”

“My brain was the instrument of my success and my pride- but it also carried all the tools for my destruction. Yes, the pills helped. But each time I put them in my mouth, it was a reminder that some people- smart people I trusted and respected- believed that I was mentally ill. That I was defective. Every dose was a concession to that.”

“But let’s put aside the labels for now. They’re a distraction and we have more important work to do.”

“No single hallucination- no threat of demonic forces or impulses I couldn’t control- had ever held me hostage like this. No one I knew, no one who loved me, knew that I was here; Tied to a bed with a net over my body. I was alone in the night with evil coming at me both from within myself and from without.”

Ellen’s observations of involuntary psych holds are too close for comfort

“That was when I learned that- for all my good intentions- I could be simultaneously on the receiving and the giving end of the stigma that goes along with mental illness.”

“I want help, not incarceration.”