🎙️ Bipolar Disorder, Love, and Breathless Creativity


Hi Reader,

Casey Cannizzaro is a mental health and addictions clinician and three-time Recovery Diaries author, but he's far, far more than that.

Casey's writing on our site—we encourage you to voraciously devour each of his essays, findable via the links to come—is exhilarating; his voice is unique, roving, insatiable, and unlike anything else we've published.

Casey is just like Recovery Diaries itself: the perfect antidote to AI slop and Chat GPT sterility. His writing will knock your socks off, and make you forget your feet are cold.
​
But we're not just here to brag about this really talented guy; we sit down with Casey to talk to him openly about his path from his last stretch of treatment into the work he does now, including substance use counseling, LGBTQIA+ focused care, and admissions for a fully virtual intensive outpatient program. Casey talks about his sexuality, his family, his ups, his downs, and he does it with integrity and flair.

Maybe one of the loveliest things about this interview is that it's an opportunity for two men who live with mental illness and aren't afraid to be vulnerable about their emotions to connect with each other, and share their mutual appreciation and respect for the other. A little love-bombing is healthy!

During the show, Casey reads his beautiful essay “The (im)possibilities of Love with Bipolar,” a story of devotion, medication, relapse, and grief told with Casey's signature wordplay and vivid imagery. "Recovery is possible. Recovery is fucked," Casey says. Who could disagree with that assessment? If this conversation resonates, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find these stories.

And after you've listened, check out Casey's other two, fabulous essays on our site: Six Days on the Good Unit: Hospitalized and Alive and After I Destroyed Myself: Fast and Furious with Bipolar Disorder and Addiction; you'll be glad you did.

All my best,
Gabe Nathan

PO Box 130, Drexel Hill, PA 19026
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

Recovery Diaries

Getting an email from us each week won’t change the world; but our mental health writers and documentary film subjects ARE changing the world. How? Through vulnerable and beautiful personal essays and professionally-produced documentary films; all showing the possibilities of mental health recovery. So, can an email update change the world? No; but it will brighten your day and, by sharing meaningful stories with someone you know, you help give our writers a voice; and THAT can change the world.

Read more from Recovery Diaries

Hi Reader, Laura Riordan knows that feeling "too happy" can be dangerous. Most people don't have to worry about feeling too happy, but, when you live with Bipolar 1, that euphoric feeling can be a very real and very nefarious signal that you are slipping into mania. Once that slide happens, it is very difficult to course-correct and you may be flying high on a terrifying ride heading towards the inevitable crash of severe depression. This is what it is to live with the bipolar beast, as Laura...

Hi Reader, I felt my breath be taken by this line in Julia Tannenbaum's newest essay on Recovery Diaries, "As the people around me fought to save my life, I fought to stay sick." When I talk about the vulnerability and insight our writers bring forward when they write about their issues with mental illness, this is what I'm talking about. I think it's very hard for people who don't understand mental illness to get their heads around the idea of someone fighting to stay sick, and this is part...

Hi Reader, Every time we receive a piece where someone is speaking up and out about their life with borderline personality disorder, a lump appears in my throat. This is just what we need as a society, I think to myself. Everyone is clamoring at the gate to speak and write about anxiety and depression, but borderline personality disorder is still shrouded in shame. They are the people you stay away from, the people whose emotional instability will bust everything apart. But that isn't true....