How Writing My Memoir Transformed Me into a Mental Health Advocate

My first audience was for my friend and bestselling author Wally Lamb’s writing group at the York Correctional Facility, a women’s prison in Niantic, Connecticut. My editor at the time, Henry Ferris, kindly forwarded 30 slightly damaged galley copies of my 2012 memoir Sharp: My Story of Madness, Cutting, and How I Reclaimed My Life, to the women a week before I showed up, so they had some time to read the text.It was an honour to be with them in the prison library, and they embraced my wife Amy and I like we were long lost family. The incarcerated ladies shared their own harried, moving stories of depression, addiction, abuse, and self-harm. It was a profound and poignant visit.When I first got a book contract from HarperCollins just before graduating with my MFA from Fairfield University in 2011, I had workshopped some memoir pieces with fellow students. Our residencies took place on a charming and petite isle called Enders Island, a gorgeous ten-acre retreat center just off Mystic, Connecticut. I knew I had something pulsing and substantial early on with my story—the feedback was quite positive from the start.I wrote my memoir in a small office in a third-floor apartment I shared with my soon-to-be-wife, Amy, in Middletown, Connecticut. I knew the book would be in readers’ hands before too long, but I had no idea how much kindness and affection I would receive back—waves of support from folks I’d never met.At first, I didn’t know how to handle all that affection from the audience, but Wally had briefed us that we should expect similar responses in the future. “Nearly everyone will tell you their story now because of your honesty in Sharp,” he said. “Audiences will share, from one event to the next, and you might ask someone like Amy to help fend off readers who are too enthusiastic.”Four months later, after ten readings at area bookstores, I started hearing from mental health communities around New England, asking if I could deliver a speech to them, expand some on what was written about in the memoir. The best thing about that development was Amy got to play a more significant role in our presentations to groups at libraries, churches, and later, appearing before Grand Rounds at the Institute of Living in Hartford.The two of us spoke to professionals at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, and to Columbia University social work students, and also spoke to lay people, clients, and doctors and psychologists at Yale University’s thirteenth annual Borderline Personality Disorder Conference in New Haven, and the Massachusetts Suicide Prevention Conference in Framingham.

To use their broken pieces of wisdom to glue others back together. It’s what makes the world go around ...

I wrote a speech entitled “Hope, Faith, and the Power of the Broken,” and Amy wrote from her own experience, the triumphs and hardships of living with and loving someone with mental illness. We dubbed it Conversations to Heal, and in it Amy shared that she wrestled with anxiety and some depression of her own, but also spoke of the unique people we met along the route.We met a trembling 16-year-old who stood up in a crowded library in Guilford and called me his hero, or an older African American woman who wore two bulky pairs of sunglasses and admitted to Amy and me that she hadn’t been outside of her group home in three years, but when she read about us appearing at the local library speaking on mental illness, she knew she needed to come. She spoke with us just as the library was nearly empty, and everyone had gone home. Before we knew it, Amy and I had somehow morphed into mental health advocates.My mom is a retired UCC minister, and my older sister, Laura, followed in her footsteps, graduated Yale Divinity School, and now works at Old Lyme Congregational Church. She was pastor at a smaller congregation at East Haddam for four years and last year had me deliver my talk there as a sermon for the day.I recall so many people greeting and affirming us. The reaction, this wave of folks getting real and sharing their wounds was way beyond anything I had ever written of in the memoir. I believe people need to speak about anguish and sorrow in their lives, and our readings became a conduit to allow the conversations to take root. And they continue to this day.It’s May 2018 now, and my book has been out in the world for six years and Amy and I continue to deliver several mental health talks each year, selling copies of Sharp as we plod along. So far, around 7,500 copies of the book have been sold, and I still haven’t earned back a cent of royalties, but that’s okay; we’re getting there, bit by bit.From here on in, though, I’ll let my “Hope, Faith and the Power of the Broken” speech take over:At times, I think back to each of the faces in the institutions I met, ones that took their lives, ones still stuck so deep in the mire, but also ones that gave me slices of pizza on lonely nights, who schooled me on life when I could only spit in the mirror, or who let me borrow music on a bad day or laughed and cried with me in group therapy. A large percentage of those souls have made it through hell themselves, and today are reaching out to affirm, to ease the burdens of others.

I guess I’d say keep fighting the fight. Try and keep turning your inner ache into something tangible ...

To use their broken pieces of wisdom to glue others back together. It’s what makes the world go around, it seems to me. Gives life its humanity, its poignancy. You pass it on, you pay it forward—I think Sharp and our talks are a way for Amy and me to lend a hand and help the emotionally shredded.Today our world is full of people wanting to assist. With tragedies and trauma happening around us almost every day, there’s an unusual amount of empathic faces that want to help the broken. What a friend of mine once described as the capacity for compassion spilling over. I hope, I pray, inside the huge wealth of love, mourning, and kindness, some constructive goodness, a real batch of caring can be targeted toward easing the plight of people with mental illness.They deserve—we deserve—not to be stigmatized, forgotten, lumped and thrown away into the cellar like some soiled, tattered rag. For those who are alone right now, so alone they don’t have anyone waiting in the wings, I want to say a few words that aren’t ever easy to undertake.I guess I’d say keep fighting the fight. Try and keep turning your inner ache into something tangible; keep painting and drawing your anguish on paper; keep scribbling your rage in notebooks; keep twirling and dancing to escape the shadows inside your head; and sculpting the voices that batter and harass you, and please understand that there are people who can and will help you in the world.So hang on—try to surround yourself with the best psychiatrist and therapist you can find. For those who self-injure, all I can say is that doing that doesn’t get you closer to anyone. It only increases your loneliness. Stop. Ask for help. Seek out counselling. Death is never an answer. Try to believe in something: a God, a song, a book, the ocean. Please don’t ever give up hope.Because people do get better.

David Fitzpatrick’s memoir, Sharp: My Story of Madness, Cutting and How I Reclaimed My Life was published in 2012 by HarperCollins. David was born in Dearborn, Michigan, grew up in Guilford, Connecticut, graduated Skidmore College, and earned his MFA degree from Fairfield University in 2011. His wife, Amy, is a technical writer for an investment firm and they live in Middlefield with two highly disturbed cats. The two are mental health advocates and give talks around New England. David’s work has appeared in New Haven Review, Barely South Review, and Perch. David is at work on a YA novel called Transfiguration.