The summer of ’87. World population reached five billion people. Ronald Reagan challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. The Harmonic Convergence ushered in a new era of universal peace as the Sun, Moon, and six of eight planets in our solar system aligned in a grand trine.
And in Texas, thousands of teenagers were being thrown into for-profit psychiatric hospitals, put on antipsychotic medication, and kept there until their family insurance ran out. I had the good fortune to be one of them.
I don’t say that ironically. Though I’ve spent most of my adult life anonymously writing cynical humor for Despair.com, and first-person sincerity is unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory for me, I consider the half-year I spent in the care of the Willow Creek Adolescent Center as a fifteen year-old to have been a peculiar sort of blessing. (more...)
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