Patient Guides

The fog was the one that ended it. You read the same work email four times and never answered it. Before that it was weight you did not choose, and before that a sex life that went flat. Every trial started the same way: a hopeful first week, a rough second, then the...

Somebody said it to you: a partner mid-argument, a friend half joking, or a video that seemed made about your week. "You're probably bipolar." Three nights of reading later you are more frightened than when you started. And the day they described was real: fine at...

Your brother-in-law did two tours. Someone at work survived something you would not repeat out loud. Next to either of those, a wreck on I-20 with the airbag dust still hanging in the car does not seem like much. You run that comparison every time it occurs to you to...

You fall asleep fine. Ten-thirty, lights out, gone. Then it is 3:47 and you are awake. Not drifting-off awake. Wide awake, heart going, already thinking. By five you have relitigated Tuesday's conversation, your finances, and most of your life. If you are waking up at...

Put on a cap and watch a cartoon. That is roughly how PRISM gets described, and the skepticism is fair. Anyone who has met a brain-training headband ad has earned some. The short answer to how PRISM works for PTSD: a cap records electrical activity at your scalp,...

Most of the conversation about ketamine goes the way you would expect: the medications that did not help, what an infusion involves, what the evidence does and does not say. Then we get to the calendar. Who drives you home after a ketamine infusion is a question to...

You have a number in your head. Three medications. Or five. You can name them in order, when each started and why each stopped, and somewhere along the way a phrase attached itself to you: I'm treatment resistant. It does not land like a description. It lands like a...

You are reading this with a work calendar open in another tab. You have read enough about TMS to think it might help, and then you picture six weeks of daily appointments against a job that does not pause. The thought underneath is usually: I can't take six weeks off....

Your pain doctor handed you a referral to psychiatry at the end of a fifteen-minute visit. You already have a theory. Somebody decided the pain is not real enough, and this is the polite version. Both answers first. No, seeing a psychiatrist for chronic pain does not...

You cooked their favorite on Sunday. It sat covered on the stove for two days. The text you sent Thursday still has no reply. You stopped saying the encouraging thing, because you watched it land and go flat. So you are here: how to help someone with depression when...

The dishes are done, and something in you starts counting. Three hours until you would normally go to bed. Two. You check the front door, sit back down, then check it again. You know how it looks. You do it anyway. By eleven the decision has made itself. The recliner,...

There was one that worked beautifully for four months, then quietly stopped. The ones after it were not wrong, exactly. None were enough. Eight years of that. Bipolar disorder misdiagnosed as depression rarely looks like a dramatic missed call. It looks like a chart...