Tag: mental healthcare

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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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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December Letters Project ~ 2022 Call For OWLS

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 annual December Letters Project. This year, we are sending out our announcement early so that you will be able to join us in holding a December Letters Project card-drive in your local area or participating in ours!

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Making Our Voices Heard: Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare, A Series of Workshops

You’re invited to join a two-hour weekly writers’ workshop resulting from a collaboration between Madwomen in the Attic, Herstory Writers Workshop, and the Coalition for Community Writing. This workshop, facilitated by Jessica Lowell Mason and Janelle Gagnon, will bring together storytellers who want to write a changed, reformed, or new mental healthcare model into existence by tuning into their experience and wisdom in order to explore, share, and shape stories and deep truths that speak back to power structures and compel a care system to care.

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The 2020 December Letters Project

This year, we faced some additional challenges in preparing for our annual December Letters Project, due to widespread school and business closings related to Covid that made it impossible for us to gather together for the project, but our OWLS came through from satellite locations to deliver cards and letters to help foster community and share love, solidarity, and fellowship.

We are grateful to all of our OWLs, past and present, in Canada, Australia, and the United States.

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