Mary

Anxiety is a funny thing because often it’s something you can hide from other people.

No one has to know you are filled with anxiety. If you can still force yourself to function, to push past the uncomfortable anxiety flooding your mind, then no one will even know you have a problem.

I realized this last week when my friend told me about her new job.

by Mariella Jane

It all started when I was 13; the boy I liked chose to "date" someone else.  People said that she and I looked alike, but she was thinner than I, very athletic, and had not yet reached puberty.  I wasn't fat.  I was 5'3" and weighed 115 lbs, but I had filled out, so of course I thought that I was a freakish cow.  This is when the restriction started...

I’ve been making the biggest improvements towards social confidence in the last three years. Before that my whole social anxiety story wasn’t a very pleasant one to tell.

In the time before the last three years I did make some improvements here and there, but I also experienced a lot of set backs.

I would for example experience an anxiety situation and would become ashamed in front of other people.

by Melissa Bickel

Anxiety and depression, a mental, emotional, and physical journey so many experience, yet so individually unique. Both anxiety and depression have worked together and apart to tear my psyche apart. When both come
calling, the attack is often brutal and violating. I'm left feeling empty and so very alone.

Anonymous

I have found MPD to be both a burden and a blessing. I have come to love Life.

For me, a normal childhood was not an option. A normal adolescence and adulthood became impossible. I, like most people of a certain age with multiple personality, was misdiagnosed. So little was know about dissociative identity disorders, or child abuse, that it was easy to see me as simply "crazy."

By Alicia Sparks

Baking a lot of cookies is not a cure for clinical depression.

My life was going along well, I thought. It was September of 2003, and I was very busy. I worked full time, my husband worked part time, and we were raising two young daughters with the help of our parents, who took turns providing daycare.

I felt like something was not quite right with my life, and I wondered what it might be.

Living with obsessive compulsive disorder

My OCD started when I was about 8. I felt physically uncomfortable stepping on pavement cracks, and then started to have obsessional thoughts that if I failed to say my prayers at night, something awful would happen to my mum.