Mental Health | joyclam

Mental Health | life beyond Major Depressive Disorder

⚠️ Trigger Warning: Please proceed with awareness of your own capacity to receive information. Mental Health is a highly personal and sensitive topic, and my own experiences and opinions cover a wide variety of controversial thoughts. Evaluate your personal response-ability as you read; take what is helpful, leave what is not.

I am not a medical professional, and nothing on this website should be taken for medical advice.

As a teenager, I was diagnosed and medicated for Major Depressive Disorder, as an incurable "hereditary chemical imbalance." After 20 years and a long, hard journey of self-advocacy and therapy, I was able to discontinue antidepressants. The withdrawal symptoms were devastating, and it's possible the medications have done "irreversible damage." I'm going to heal and live an amazing life anyway.

I believe depression and mental health challenges are biological messengers of things that need to be changed in our environments, lives, and belief systems, as well as biological pathogens like tick-borne illness, and we would do better to build supportive and enabling communities, and a system of accessible diagnostics and psychotherapy, than to prescribe long-term medications with potentially devastating side effects. Especially for minors, for whom many of these drugs are never tested and approved clinically.

Survivor's Guilt (Both Sides Now)

2025/6 | acrylic on canvas | 24cm x 30 cm

Who's That Girl?*

Becoming and Homecoming | The joy of turning back the clock, second chances, and rediscovering myself

Thriver's Block

I healed for THIS?! Nah, I'm good.

New Rails for the Crazy Train

A big part of healing my nervous system was to accept the weirdness, love it, and give myself the freedom to explore it without judgment, without labels, without diagnoses, treatments, or suppression.

The Purpose-Driven Death

The Toxic Spiral of Looking for Purpose in Suffering

Happy Tickaversary - Year 9: Lomtalanítás

It's long and hard and lonely sometimes; no one tells you how to come back from the dead. But I made a promise I intend to keep with every fiber of my being: if I got a second chance at all the things I loved and took for granted, I wouldn’t waste it this time on fear and self-doubt. I was gonna live.

He Opened Not His Mouth

TW: Religious Abuse | The deadly consequences of silence

Happy Tickaversary - Year 8: Moving

This Tickaversary post is purposely, joyously, and miraculously late. I had a feeling long ago that it might be, and I began so many drafts of this post throughout the year to get a head start, trying to remember my experiences and progress. But so much happens in the meantime that what I wrote (which felt Really Big and Important at the time) always seems so small and insignificant. Or rather, the lessons I learned incorporate so fluidly into my life that they become routi

Archives: The Darkest Day: Winter Solstice and Religious Trauma

A little holiday self-destruction and deconstruction

This Leaf

This Leaf | A Poem by Joyclam

Happy Tickaversary - Year 7: The Monastery of St. Borrelia and The Existential Crisis

Can I respect everything in its season – winter, exhaustion, rest, grief? Can I honor Sabbath, transition, liminal spaces, unknowing?

Hollowgraphy

Post-Coronial dystopia

Prisoners of War

In the war at home, I honor the sanctity of grief. My grief. Their grief. Your grief. Our grief.

Antidepressants, Withdrawal, and Other Scary Stories

Tricks and Treats for Getting Off Antidepressants (not-medical advice from not-a-doctor)

Happy Tickaversary - Year 6: Re-Mission

What remission from chronic Lyme is NOT is a sudden restoration to 100% health. A new life is here. And there’s no road map. Now what?

Where's The Poop, Robin? Prologue (Part 1)

My Lyme Story: For all the talk of finding the root cause, are we never getting to it: belief systems that perpetuate stress and fear?

Where's The Poop, Robin?: The Lyme Paradigm (Part 2)

My Lyme Story: Digging up dirt on The Chronic Lyme Paradigm

Where's The Poop, Robin?: It Ain't Lyme Brain (Part 3)

My Lyme Story: How deep does this go? Is Chronic Lyme just the tip of a much bigger iceberg?

Where's The Poop, Robin?: The Turning Point (Part 4)

My Lyme Story: Here I had it - the brain region responsible for all my problems, past and present: ADD, Depression, & psychiatric Lyme

Where's The Poop, Robin?: Christ, That Stinks (Part 5)

My Lyme Story: When you are raised since conception with the teaching that you're a guilty depraved sinner deserving of eternal punishment, and the only cure is to die to self and become someone else... how do you NOT become self-destructive; i.e. autoimmune?

Where's The Poop, Robin?: Everybody Poops (Part 6)

My Lyme Story: If we were raised in a culture of "No Pain, No Gain" or "suffering for Christ", how could we ever accept self-care and rest for healing?

"Yes, and...": Counting All Joy, On One Middle Finger

The Power of Validating our Lived Experience | In my health and trauma work over the past few years, I’ve come to explore and accept the very necessary concept of non-dualistic thinking; yin and yang, opposite but essential, both true… “yes, and.” It's usually called "both/and" thinking.