Why I Wrote This Book Mental Health Awareness Month Special Edition: Myna Wallin Muses on Psychiatry Then and Now

This was originally published on our Patreon in October 2024. We’re re-sharing it here to kick off Mental Health Awareness Month, May 2025.

You can read a review of Myna Wallin’s poetry Collection, The Suicide Tourist here. The Suicide Tourist was also named a TMR Best Poetry Book of 2024!

After decades of silence, I finally ‘came out’ as bipolar through my poetry collection, The Suicide Tourist. Why did it take so long? In a previous piece for River Street Writing, I attributed my hesitation to being a Baby Boomer (1946-1964), stuck in the lingering shame and stigma of an era that cast mental health in a negative light. Mindsets have changed considerably, with Gen Z (1997-2012) emerging as the most open generation when it comes to discussing mental health, largely because they’ve used social media to help amplify and normalize the conversation.

In this piece, I want to use my vantage point as a Boomer to examine the disparity between the treatment I got in the late 1970s compared to the way the system treats patients now.

The term “bipolar disorder” was first coined in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III), published in 1980. Before that, the term “manic-depressive” had been used but “manic” was too close to “maniac,” making it problematic. Changing the label was meant to change attitudes. But I would argue that before very long the term “bipolar” became stigmatized as well, and the condition is still widely misunderstood.

My mental health journey began in the late 1970s when my mother died, and I was still a teenager. Grief-stricken and angry, I became manic.  I was given antipsychotic meds prescribed for schizophrenia (Stelazine, Haldol, Nozinan), even though no one had ever diagnosed me formally with schizophrenia—or anything else for that matter. After a half-hearted suicide attempt, I was admitted to a hospital which aimed for a groovy Peter Max vibe with purple and orange cushions and chairs. While it seems impossible now, they kept me there for months and months. Incredibly, it took another twenty years until I was able to get a diagnosis of bipolar 1.

Overmedicating patients, both in and out of hospital, was the horrendous standard practice back in the 70s. If you refused to take your meds orally, they would threaten to administer them with a needle. We drugged-up patients had names for the different side effects of the meds: Nozinan shuffle, Haldol hell, with its drooling, tics, and torpor, and Stelazine seventeen, another anti-psychotic that caused extreme weight gain.

Worse than this cocktail of anti-psychotics, the doctors wanted to give me electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), called “electroshock” at the time. Personally, I don’t think “electroconvulsive” sounds any more appetizing. By then (1975), Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, had been released as a film. Thankfully, the hospital needed the patient’s permission to use ECT, and I refused! I refused again and again. They tried to coerce me, saying they would let me go in a couple of weeks if I submitted to it, but I’d seen too many patients return with a terrible unresponsive look on their faces.

In the past decade or so, ECT has again been touted as effective, particularly for people with drug-resistant depression. But the worst side effect of ECT was (and still is) memory loss or “retrograde amnesia.” And there was no accounting for which memories you would lose. That terrified me more that the image of Jack Nicholson as McMurphy chewing on a bite block.

So in the late 70s I was not in fact psychotic, I was manic. I was angry and sad that my mother had just died, and I was still a teenager coping with this loss. I’m grateful in hindsight that patients had to give their consent to receive ECT—I never trusted the procedure. A cursory glance at the current ECT Reddit page elucidates a horror show of bad experiences. (Mind you, Carrie Fisher was famously a fan of it.)

Society was undergoing significant changes during the 1960s, with the anti-psychiatry movement and the de-institutionalization movement of the 1960s and 1970s which continued into the 1980s. Plus all these shiny new medications were being introduced, and the theory was that most patients didn’t need to be institutionalized if they took them.

But that theory didn’t play out, unfortunately, with many patients who had no support system were left to fend for themselves on the street. These ideas were never reversed because the new rules saved governments money. The result of de-institutionalization directly contributes to the problems of homelessness and mental illness we see every day in the world around us. 

The anti-psychiatry movement did not leave me unscathed. After several years of terrible psychiatric treatment and taking mega doses of medication for my yet undiagnosed condition, I heard about a new therapy called Therafields, “a psychoanalytic commune” recommended by my yoga teacher. To apply, you couldn’t be on any medication. That sounded great to me. I threw all my meds down the toilet. But Therafields didn’t include any understanding of my condition, and no surprise, didn’t last long.

On a positive note, the societal changes helped lessen the shame and stigma I grew up with.

Part of that was because famous artists and people in general were feeling more comfortable in sharing their mental health journeys. New and better targeted medications became available, along with an improved ability to diagnose patients more accurately. But movements like de-institutionalization have been disastrous, to individual patients and society. Lack of resources is also a huge factor: In my experience, you need to exaggerate your symptoms to secure a bed in psychiatric care. Someone I know could not get any help for her sister, who was suicidal. They tossed her off the ward after just a few days. She returned a few times, until she succeeded in “un-aliving” herself, as the kids call it now.

There’s a common misconception around those with bipolar disorder: It’s the romanticizing of mental illness in films and books that is so misleading, as though it’s a fascinating and rarefied life we lead. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s “take your meds, get your sleep, stay balanced, and don’t succumb to the allure of mania.” Sounds easy but when the chemicals in your brain misfire, chaos and disorientation takes over.

Am I sad I lost part of my early adulthood to a mental illness that was misdiagnosed and mistreated? Certainly. But there’s a relief in knowing I can finally share my story with others. And I can happily say, there is a very good life waiting on the other side of a bipolar diagnosis.