Defining mental health, mental illness, and your version of health

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In April, I wrote a book review for The Body Is a Doorway, a memoir by Sophie Strand. Sophie questions definitions of physical health. She channels her experience with Ehlers-Danos syndrome into a magical realism-infused perspective on reality. But she embraces the messy line between supernatural and super-real because she has found her illness as something that takes her out of a conventional understanding of health. 

But why are we always comparing ourselves to versions of health that we never necessarily had? That we long for, a nostalgia akin to childhood innocence? When have we ever been in full health? What the heck is conventional health anyways? 

 

 

I ask myself this set of questions all the time, and they have bearing for the students who come to seek mental health guidance with me. These questions set a compass for my own practice and inner growth. I’ve been challenged in seeking answers, and I have needed to revise my understanding of the mind and body, how they work upon (work with, work against) each other, and where the soul (the mediator of all experience), tells us, “this feels true for me” or “this isn’t right and now I’m struggling with my inner life).

This is the point that my worldview departs from mainstream mental health protocol (which in short summary is that the individual is responsible for their own health and that the body is a machine and disorders have just a biological basis, and that the mind is a finite thing). I work with a post-material mindset. In part I see things in systems of energy. There are only waves ofenergy in the form of experiences that our soul must move through and then let go. The result creates a perception of inner life and affects the body in many ways.

The value of thinking like this results in the meaning that we make from the experience. I believe in the things you feel or sense that can’t be quantified until you language them in your own way. 

 

And I also believe that mental health is different from mental illness. The way a person can manage their mental life is similar to the way a person can manage their physical life. Mental health is about inner life and relates to how well a person functions, performs daily duties, honors a social contract. Mental illness distinguishes the way a body responds to the physical world.  Mental health might be affected by a mental disorder, and the “disorder” is more or less an atypical neurology, which means the individual inherently experiences the world in a way that is different from most people. The body is doing something different from another body, and that is the entry point to assess health–what is health for that body? 

And then there’s the narrative. People who are “not healthy” inherit that preconceived storyline as they live their own experience. Individuals with a mood disorder like bipolar disorder arrive in a world that treats them with the veil of “otherness” in their human experiences. Bipolar disorder is a body that is prone to extreme mood swings, which include emotional highs (mania or hypomania) and lows (depression). Such fluctuations and changes to the experience of reality affects behavior, energy levels, thinking, and daily functioning. The narratives constructed around these symptoms based on definitions of health are disingenuous.

I embody my bipolar disorder diagnosis because that label connects me with a community who knows the challenges of having that type of atypical neurology–the mood swings, cognitive dysfunction, manic-pixie-girl hypersexualized motif that appears in mainstream media. It took me years to achieve the level of stability I have now. One of the most salient points in my journey toward recovery is the acknowledgement that I was actually a person within the disorder. I don’t think mental healthcare (or healthcare professionals in general) know how to make the distinction between a person and their disorder. There is a me (a you, a we) within the experience of a person with atypical neurology. Just as there is a unique self in a person who has had a traumatic brain injury or someone cannot verbalize their inner life. 

The point of mental healthcare isn’t to restore a person to a level of functioning that others who are healthy embody; the point is to empower a person to cultivate the dedication to health as it is relevant for them while building a meaningful self-care practice and community around others who validate that dedication.

The way this relates to a post material worldview is that this highlights (in my opinion) the quality of experience. How are we receiving the moment? Where are the waves of energy hitting? The body and mind aren’t just machines; they operate within the ecosystem of the soul to body and mind. And, as Marc Wittman (German philosopher and researcher on time) says: “Experience takes place in the present moment only” (2023, p. 41). 

 

 

In a poor state of mental health, there are challenges to presence. In mental disorders, the access of the present (and the perception of time) might be too open or too limited so that the individual lacks an awareness of the present because their ability to interact with it is affected by atypical neurology. Wittman’s book is an excellent exploration about the perceptual passage of time, the way time is constructed in the body, and (my favorite) the way that time alters perception and consciousness so that the continuity of the moment is interrupted. Disorders such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can throw the normalized perception of time into a less conventional and easy to understand experience. 

For that reason, I argue for labels (aka diagnoses) and the ability to find community within those diagnoses. I believe that the meaning-making and connections forged in community are crucial for establishing a connection to soul (the individual to the awareness inside)  within those disorders. It happened for me during my own journey (one that I recount in my Hero’s Journey). It is also a jumping off point for redefining our understanding of spiritual–material reality. Once I could detach from the stuff of my mind (and recognize it as an ecosystem, a separate thing, a [so to speak] altered state of consciousness [the mood swings were happening but I was not the mood swings]), I could start to dissect the contents of it. It’s about making the moment of the swing into an atypical experience, ordinary by examining it. The definition of health must come from the individual having the experience. A person who has a determined commitment to themselves, a self-care practice that directly supports that commitment, and a community to validate their experience is a person who will achieve a definition of health that is meaningful to them––something I have done myself.

 

 

This is the principle and foundation of Planet Dust Enterprises, my online business created to serve GenX individuals with an affective disorder, their therapists, and their caregivers. We have a distinct experience of reality, an inherited and a forced-upon-us narrative, and a lack of transparency around what it means to live in health, that is, in recovery, with a body and mind that experience reality in a way that many other bodies and minds do not.

Narrative shift happens when stories, one by one are rewritten into meaningful and empowered spaces and are offered out into the world. A person’s experience can be a domino that tips a line and lets another person discover more of their true nature and understand themselves as a collection of parts and in parts, a whole. Understanding our true nature, really knowing who we are, can make the way we live a part of the health we embody. As living beings, our relationship with the world we live in changes.

This means rewriting our versions of health every day. 

Works mentioned

Wittmann, M. (2023). Altered States of Consciousness. MIT Press.

 

The writer behind The Conversation

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and mental health practitioner who helps GenX individuals with mood disorders, their therapists, and their caregivers source inner joy in this dumpsterfire world.

I offer my words as service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects me and inspired me to go beyond mainstream mental health protocols to find my own joy. May my ideas ignite a fire inside of you.

I offer consultations, workshops, and a group program through my online business Planet Dust. It’s a global community for GenX individuals with mood disorders, their caregivers, and their mental healthcare practitioners. Learn to work with your active mind and imagination to make meaning. It’s psychological and it’s spiritual.

I also work in the advertising and publishing spheres. Information is medicine, so why not work directly with it? The gatekeepers of culture are those who allow or inhibit ideas. 

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

 

Start a conversation to book a consultation

Book Review: The Body is a Doorway

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AUDIO REVIEW

The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand leads to the doorstep of self-empowerment. It starts with the recognition that the body is rich. Intricate, nature-based systems give us insight to the piece of the puzzle and through that, provide us a way to experience the nectar of interconnectedness that heals our existential longing, if only for a fleeting moment. There’s no need to give our individual power away to narratives of health that are fundamentally based on lack. The Earth is rich.  Our embodiment and beingness is already wealthy in riches regardless of physical status.

The originality of Sophie’s prose reads like a botanist’s journal had a love affair with a professor of postcolonial literature. What results is a perfectly sculpted body of work that takes a steady walk through a diverse ecosystem of healing potential. What struck me most is Sophie’s ability to give bitter medicine in the form of sweet milk. This memoir is autotheory, a format of feminist critique where the normative gaze is woven between information and story. It’s “power through knowledge” and Sophie successfully distances herself from masculine logic and meaning-making. (Fournier, 2021) Sophie does bring a queerness to her experience, especially in the forest. The flora and fauna and death-rebirth ecosystem need nothing but themselves to keep on going. By extension, humans need reasons and things beyond themselves. 

The Body is a Doorway gives me a lasting love affair, generous, considering it started as a one-night stand (an evening of bed rotting and reading till 3am and suddenly, the book was done).  This book was an oblique take-down of health “wellness” as a concept and reframed it and self care and disability as differently-abled values. So generous.

Sophie refers so often to mythology, that one must wonder if she has coffee with all the cast of characters or if they are her marathon partners. She talks in myth as fluently and with integrity as a professor. In referring to Penelope’s myth, Sophie weaves and unweaves a death shroud–Death is never finished. This perpetuates the pain of being, which for Sophie seems to lie in the nebulous unknowing of what will set her body into a flare: her stomach to vomit or her nerves to freeze like a deer in headlights. Never escaping, she befriends the value of never-ending. The only story that ends here is her ability to escape pain. For Sophie, and for her readers, the light isn’t at the end of the tunnel; it’s already inside for you to step through.

Dragon Cairn on Overlook Mountain (Anastasia’s photo, June 2017)

There’s no trite mention of transcendence. And I know well the healing power of the Catskills (especially Overlook Mountain, mentioned several times in the book)–the right meadow or trailhead or glimpse of golden light at sunset will put you in an altered state. A deep connection to land can activate the transpersonal self–a wide, expansive, or field-like conception of self (Fox, 2017)–and this experience is duly and beautifully conveyed here: 

I ducked under a fringe of ivy trailing down from a stone entryway that had once held a door. Someone had camped on the mountain, setting a fire in the blown-out remains of a hearth. Peppery drafts of ash and pollen streaked through the roofless ballroom. Spiderwebs laced up the windows, long and glassless. Peppermint starbursts of mountain laurel hovered like pink clouds at the top of a staircase that led into open air.(Strand, p. 70)

Can you feel it? Can you be there? Can you step through the empty door or fly through the open window? I work with clients who explore the psycho-spiritual experience. In the years of this work, we do a lot of imagining. The scene  quoted above from The Body is a Doorway, is an invitation that I might use. Step out of your day to day. Step out of normal. Step out of the self that is limited by what you can only see around you. Can you expand into the smell of peppermint starbursts or feel the draft of ash? Where does this imagining take you?

I’ve encountered those who spiritually bypass, unable to drop into the embodiment of their bodies, unable to feel the pain or reaction to any experience. They often say, “It’s the Universe’s plan” or “Just go with the flow.” Dangerous detours. And there are others I’ve encountered who frequent a psychotherapist’s office, without resolve or meaningful progress in reframing their painful inner experience. To both of these individuals I’d recommend Sophie’s book because she does neither. She is able to find stable ground and then she digs deeper, just looking. Sometimes she encounters miniscule but alive ecosystems that remind her of life, and this is what brings her back, despite the spiritual and physical discomfort. A kaleidoscope of poetic descriptions awaits those who dare to drop into Sophie’s body of work. With Sophie, you’re in for a circular experience, a term artist Zara Kand used in a review of an unrelated Surrealist art show referring to the way the artist “negotiated the gallery space… how my mind moved from examination to inquiry to insight and back again.” The surreality of Sophie’s work provides a similar landscape to narrate.

The normative narrative around health is the problem. Remember how I said I found The Body to be an oblique critique? Sophie effectively asks, “Is this a health problem?” When the body doesn’t work as it should, when it generates pain, adverse reaction to life, hemorrhaging function for an embodied and leashed-form of incarnation, of course—there’s a health problem. This is what Hygeia, the goddess of health, would be invoked for. When it’s a question of comfort, Venus is the main character. The journey must go below and beyond the workings of the mainstream narrative of white, cis embodiment. Sophie’s self care and allowing herself to be in flow with the nonhuman world–the spores, the plants, the animals, the collective unconscious–affords her the wealth of disability. There’s so much that lives between the cracks. Broken, breaking, crack, renew, recalibrate, regenerate. The circular experience of weaving a never-ending story in the fabric of ripped, patched, spun. The Body is a Doorway is an excellent manual for your own journey of being and becoming.

 

Email your local library. Have them order a copy. Once you read it, return it, put it back on the shelf like you were planting a seed. Let others discover their power through this work, too.

 

What I was referring to…

Fournier, L. (2002). Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press.
Fox, W. (1990). Transpersonal ecology: “Psychologizing” ecophilosophy. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 22(1), 59–96.
Kand, Z. (2024, September 10). A Circular Experience: “With the Moon Under Our Feet” at the Hansell Gallery. https://dispatchesmag.com/review-with-the-moon-under-our-feet/

Strand, S. (2025). The Body is a Doorway: A Memoir. Running Press.

 

The writer behind The Conversation

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who wants to integrate transpersonal psychology into your practice, go here
  • If you are a mid-life woman who wants to hold your own, let teach you about managing your light in a dark world here

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences

Psychospiritual Growth: Chiron and writing through the wounded healer

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Chiron is an easy energetic fantasy. Think about a romanticized version of someone who is damaged or troubled or haunted by past experiences, but this person brings insight and depth and with these, heals others through the very nature of their presence. The wounds have value. Chiron as an archetype is difficult to embody and address in a group. No one wants to hear about your suffering, let alone be part of it, right? Arriving at the point of “healed,” is where the wounds finally start shining their diamonds from the rough.

I’m at another turn of the spiral right now, and Chiron is still here. He’s the centaur in the room. I wrote about my experiences earlier in my journey with Chiron in another post. Different time, different place.

 

So let’s go deeper for a higher vibration.

The Story of Chiron

Chiron is both–animal and (wo)man. Chiron is never of this world but is yet in this world. His place in Greek mythology is solidified with being wounded by a poisoned arrow, and being immortal suffers through this pain for eternity. Ironically, he was unable to heal himself, but became a gifted teacher and healer of others. The gift of Chiron, is that we may become powerful healers for others who we share the same wound with. To end his own suffering, he gives up his immortality for Prometheus’s freedom. (If you’re familiar with Prometheus’ myth, he was imprisoned and tortured for eternity by the Gods for giving fire and enlightenment to man.) Chiron, even in death, served humanity. His ability to die, leave his body that was in anguish from a wound caused by an errant arrow–what couldn’t kill him made him in agony until he became human. 

In astrology, we take the metaphor that Chiron (the energy of) is the wounded healer. We say that where the wound is, the light gets in. Chiron speaks to the energy of emotional wounds acquired now or across time. Each moment is a good moment to embrace embodiment. This is how to recover from trauma.

This is where “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and turns into “what doesn’t kill you should have killed you, but it kills at least one version of you.” 

Breaking patterns

Death is what causes us to break a pattern. Christine Simmonds-Moore writes about the nature of reality as fractals in Paranormal Ruptures. She says that fractals (mathematical patterns or meta-patterns, patterns of patterns) are a good way to understand parapsychological experiences. (2023) When we consider that the nature of reality is light and information (information transfer), and the body is a material mediator of that spiritual nature, then looking at patterns can help the logical function of the mind to organize what may seem vast and overwhelming. The nature of fractals can be an organizing framework for phenomena that are pathologized and neglected. (Moore, 2023)

Healing is natural. Depression, the kaleidoscope of emotional energy within it, manifestations of bodily dis-ease, lapses into liminal states, and dysregulated engagement with shared reality are healthy during the healing process. 

My personality had, for years, been based on those terms. A constellation of traumatic events as a young child who experienced trauma, and later, my body’s tendency toward dysregulation due to atypical neurology, led me to disassociate easily. I had a vivid imagination, one that worked in overdrive to compensate for the world I didn’t understand how to survive in. A growing intellectual body is providing support for this idea. A child seeks to avoid the pain (traumatic experience) and thoughts, perceptions, and memories are put behind a sort of barrier. (2025, Wade) Disassociate tendencies provide a way to function in the world, that is, have a sense of self. (2025, Wade) The disinhibitory pattern has been called cognitive disorganization. It’s associated with positive traits such as a high capacity for creativity because of new and unique associations that can be made. (2025, Wade) In other words, my Chironic nature contributed to the sickness, even though it was also helping me. My creative thinking was breaking the pattern and pattern breaking. The poison and the medicine are one in the same.

Transformation through writing

So I wrote. If you’ve read my work, you can immediately pick up on how introspective it is. In autofiction, I rarely interact with people around me. I meticulously characterize the sensory world. I have to write what I see around me to come back to this reality:

In my office: a hand-painted bench that my younger brother and I painted; our initials on it; our paint splotches in random drops. The cardboard carpet piece is half the size of the room, with random thoughts, and scribbles, and doodles. The scrap of red carpet on the other side, with lines of white and yellow… the floor length purple curtains that now, in the weak morning light, are casting a soft purple glow. A pink glittery hula hoop suspended from the ceiling with white ribbon and pink shower curtain hooks. The 3-foot-tall fake sunflower that was given to me by my older brother when I was 18, an item that has travelled the world and back—currently tied to black metal shelves with sparkly pipe cleaners: green, silver, blue.

 

In my fiction, I offer fantasy worlds. My current work in progress (a novella tentatively called High Voltage) offers an alternative reality, a mirror of the current world, in which the most fucked up around IRL are actually the ones to create safe spaces. Here’s how I made the world safe; written to mirror what I wanted to see in the world: 

 

Mithras brought his hands together, bowed, and said, “Step back,” to everyone else. A ball of light floated up out of the ground, then broke into four, which floated out horizontally above Orestes. Mithras laid his pack down and kneeled next to the man, placed his hands at the bottom of the spine. A whirring sound began. Orestes’ frame vibrated and lifted from the dirt, shimmering and floating and twisting and turning into air, then fell back down to the ground, the sudden levitation over. The body started to twitch. Hands reached up, the legs kicked. Torso and legs stood and folded over. The balls of energy disappeared into Orestes. The air held still. His body radiated.

 

It’s the magical world that I fell into that made me heal. It’s where superpowers–mind-mind communication, encounters with magical beings, floating in the liminal space between lives, encounters with body and ego death–that free the spirit. Wade (2025) notes that functional dissociation is encouraged in cultures that value spiritual and anomalous experiences. 

Trauma and the difficulties of life can break the mind, cause disassociation, and linger. Traumatic childhood. Creative adult, right? It’s common knowledge in psychology that childhood experiences shape our adulthood experiences. That’s part of being human. 

And yet, we are also souls, and we bring into this incarnation lifetimes of those childhoods. The pain that accompanies the soul is existential. 

My pain has been just being on Earth.

If existential pain is pathologized, we’re invoking Chiron–the pattern of emotional wounding carried across lifetimes. The undying pain. 

“Who became my power, my essence?” Ask yourself that question. And listen –that person– is the doorway to step through. Become that person. Who is the Prometheus in you that Chiron will sacrifice his life for? How can you die in one way, to let your humanity shine through in another? This is a way of activating Chironic energy. This can be a series of tests that lead to portals where you ask, “Should I step through here?” and let the old version of you die. 

The wound is the medicine–and likewise, the repetitive stories. 

Patterns over incarnation is the karma we bring. It’s the repetition of actions. When we’re stuck in the pain, the patterns can’t break. For me, it’s being in the world. A dizzying influx of sounds and sight impressions. Existing as a single person in an inhuman government. A civilization so large that I am annihilated in small existence. Identifying the patterns, seeing where they break, is where your light comes in.

Light increases light. Sharing here, and as always, as my divine mission to bring my own journey to words to the world as medicine.

A text from a student who received a box of all my autofiction books.

 

What I was referring to…

Cameron, K and Wade, J. (2025) Childhood trauma and the emergence of precognitive abilities: a correlational study. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive. 108. https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/advance-archive/108

Simmonds-Moore, C. (2023). Parapsychological Experiences as a Fractalized System. In Paranormal Ruptures. Essay, Beyond the Fray.

 

The writer behind The Conversation

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who wants to integrate transpersonal psychology into your practice, go here 
  • If you are a mid-life woman who wants to hold your own, let teach you about managing your light in a dark world here

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences