Thursday, June 27, 2013

Adolescent Repair While You Wait


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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