I began my adventure in mental health with a diagnosis with #bipolardisorder. This adventure has been a scary ride, but I’ve been able to get through it with unconditional support, mental health care, and community resources. Through it all, I realized fast, that the care that I have experienced is…

First thing, if you are someone with a mental health diagnosis and reading this, know that I am 100% certain you are capable of holding a job. It’s more possible than you think, EVEN if you have history of not being able to hold a job before. Why do I…

I started to write on LinkedIn in 2017, thinking no one would view my writing. It just was a place where I could “store” writing and come back to it later. I didn’t know how to use LinkedIn except for writing and professional connecting. At the time I didn’t really…

In 2010 I graduated from high school thinking I had my life all planned out. I was under this impression that if you picked the right college, you were lined up for success. What I wasn’t told, was that there were things that would be out of your control and…

I envisioned life as perfection when I got stable after a bipolar disorder diagnosis in 2013. Instead, life was harder and was not at all sympathetic to the road that I had been traveling which was windy, rough, and scary. My life without a bipolar diagnosis was scary. I was…

I remember the first time my psychiatrist told me about the concept of stability. It was this “magical” term that meant normalcy to me. Normalcy was what I had been striving for weeks into my diagnosis. Was it possible? My psychiatrist said the medication that I was taking would gradually…

In 1991 my sister and I were immediately put into emergency foster care after we were born. Our birth mother was not well enough to care for us and left the hospital after our birth. I grew up knowing three things about my birth mother: 1. She was Tongan 2…

My name is Susan Gadegone. I am a mental health writer/blogger and Lead Peer Counselor in the San Francisco Bay Area. What made you get into writing? When I could develop a sentence and write it down on paper, that’s when I started to write. I used to hold a notebook in my hands as I…