Tag: mental health

Emily Wu Truong

From Lady in Green to Psychiatric Survivor:
How 988 Shattered My Trust in the Mental Healthcare System

By Emily Wu Truong

For over a decade, I devoted my life to mental health advocacy. I believed in change — in compassion, in awareness, in recovery. My journey began with my local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), where I first found community when my family did not know how to be a support to me. Later, I connected with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) and joined the California Mental Health Movement, back when it was still called Each Mind Matters.

As part of their campaign promoting the lime green ribbon for mental health awareness, I became known as the Lady in Green. They featured my story. I felt validated. I spent years fighting stigma, amplifying AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) voices, delivering nearly 200 talks, and working within a system I believed could help people heal.

In 2022, when the national 988 crisis line launched, I called and texted the line to test it — to better understand what others in crisis might experience. A year later, I called again. But this time, it wasn’t a test.

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Tiara Raven Marie Clover

Blood for Water: Hands

I could begin with how I often lay in bed thinking about the blood running down my arms while looking out at the flowers from my window. I could trace my laying out to the fact that we don’t talk about Jerry. Jerry, who supposedly was cleaning his gun in the laundry room and the gun went off.  I could talk about the ways the story changes over time from person to person.

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2025 December Letters Project

It’s that time of year: December Letters Project preparation time!

We invite you and/or your families, clubs, organizations, schools, and communities to be part of MITA’s – 2025 – December Letters Project. This is MITA’s annual local literacy project, but we encourage others to run a December Letters Project in their local communities if you’re not local to the greater western New York region.

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Lee Blackbird

Ode to my kidneys

Until recently, I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t think about you or worry about you. You were my unsung lifeline.

But now, you are showing signs of exhaustion. I feel you, nestled somewhere beneath my rib cage, one of you on each side, breaking a little bit more each day. I feel you, dying.

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Elise Boria

Within Sterile Walls

For so long I could still see the hospital from my dorm room. With its concrete structure perforating the landscape as an incessant reminder. The windows that crawled up its sides like ants, with each one seemingly whispering to me, and I’m repulsed. I can always feel the visceral response welling in my body when I see it, somewhere between comical and infuriating. Now in the mornings its form haunts me, and in the evening when I close the curtains, it still manages to live in the dark and silent room. It swallows tranquility, spitting back up a mocking tar like mass that attaches itself to my skin.

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Natalie Forsyth

Uncomfortable, Yet Familiar: An Asylum Experience

I take you to my room on a cold April morning. My head usually feels like the boulder Sisyphus had to push up the hill but that day it was much worse. The littlest sounds felt like I was being waterboarded. Drip, drip, drip. They came to me like drops of water slowly hitting my head. Each one more agonizing than before.

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