⚠️ 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.

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I believe depression and mental health challenges are biological messengers of things that need to be changed in our environments, lives, and belief systems, and we would do better to build supportive and enabling communities, and a system of accessible 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.​