• Rachel

    Rachel cried constantly. She thought it was normal—that everyone had the feelings of despair that lingered in her mind.

  • Sarah

    If they handed out Purple Hearts for wounds suffered on the battlefield of teenage mental illness, Sarah would have more than a few.

  • Kimberly

    While suffering from a chemical imbalance with schizophrenic and bi-polar symptoms, Kimberly felt everything was normal—it was the people around her who were acting strange. It wasn’t until she began to emerge from her illness that she became scared, realizing that what she saw as reality was false, and what she had deemed false was […]

  • Gordon

    One small step from death, Gordon chose life. Standing on a stool, drunk, with a belt wrapped around his neck and his hands bound with zip ties, something inside of him stilled his soul and he paused. Thirty minutes later he had freed his hands, removed the belt from his neck and survived. He would […]

  • Emily

    The first time Emily forced herself to throw up, she locked herself in the bathroom and spent an hour sticking her hand down her throat trying to gag. She finally succeeded. She was fifteen years old.

  • Grayson

    By the time Grayson was in pre-school, parents were refusing to let their kids play with him. Aggressive and violent, he would fight, scream and in his words, “I didn’t want to get along with anybody and I didn’t want to be the normal kid and I didn’t want to do the normal things.”

  • Gracie

    Gracie knew she was bi-polar when she was 11. That was when she discovered her father had the illness and she recognized herself in his behavior. But it wasn’t until three years later that she was officially diagnosed. “I’ve definitely felt different pretty much my whole life. I’ve had a lot of problems throughout my […]