Medicated Prayers: Two Poets on Stigma, Survival, and Sacred Truths
About mental illness, misdiagnosis, and the quiet holiness of surviving what others fear to name.
Two poets. Both writing about mental health struggles. It was only natural for us to strike up a collaboration. Maybe just once or twice, maybe more often. We’ll take it one step at a time.
Today, Marie Charon and I each share a poem about stigma. We start with Marie’s poem Unseen Burdens.
Unseen Burdens
They say get over it
as if it were a bad day,
a shadow you can shake
like rain from a coat.
But how do you dry
what soaks your bones?
They see the trembling hands,
the scattered thoughts,
the needle-scarred history,
and name you lost
before you even speak.
Addict.
Crazy.
The labels stick
like wet leaves on a windshield,
obscuring the view
of the person beneath.
They don't see the mornings
you rise anyway—
spoons clattering,
coffee brewing,
despite the voices
whispering failure
before the sun.
They don’t hear the prayers
you whisper into your meds,
or the courage it takes
to walk past liquor stores
like graveyards
of your former selves.
They see a diagnosis,
not the dignity
of staying alive
when your mind
makes war against you.
They love stories
with neat redemptions,
not the quiet, aching truth
of relapse and return,
of crawling back
on bleeding knees
to the light.
You wear your truth
like a second skin—
invisible to most,
but heavy,
like armor forged
in fire they never felt.
Still,
you keep walking.
Still,
you speak.
Because silence
never saved anyone.
Let them call you broken.
You know better—
you are mosaic.
You are flame.
And no one who burns
this long
without turning to ash
is anything less
than holy.
Stigma doesn’t shout; it whispers, sidesteps, and dresses itself in politeness and pity, convincing us we are our diagnoses, our addictions, our worst moments—then asks why we don’t try harder to “be normal.”
These two poems tear through that silence with raw truth, reminding us that schizoaffective disorder doesn’t pass like weather and addiction doesn’t vanish with one good choice.
These aren’t bad days; they are lifetimes stitched with fight.
Beneath every label is someone who rises anyway, takes their meds, walks past temptation, and carries the silence of survival like an unnamed psalm.
There’s holiness in that—not the sanitized, storybook kind but the gritty, bruised holiness born of relapse and return, of crawling back from the edge and daring to hope for love on the other side.
These poems refuse to hide the truth: healing isn’t linear, survival isn’t glamorous, and you can be both suffering and sacred at once.
To call someone “broken” is easy; to call them mosaic—to honor the shattered and shining pieces they’ve gathered into a life—takes humility.
To call them flame, as the poem does in its final breath, is to see what stigma cannot: resilience as radiance, pain as illumination, the slow burn of endurance that refuses to turn to ash.
For those of us who have walked through addiction, through madness, through the furnace of misunderstanding, these poems remind us life is not a mirror but a lantern, reminding us that we are not alone.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” —John 1:5
Mine started with these four lines:
he was a complex puzzle
of symptoms self and side effects
but stigma doesn't like complex
and only looks at the grotesque
As I worked on it, it grew into a pantoum.
axis of reality patient presents as a complex puzzle symptoms include hallucinations and delusions catatonic behaviour and depressed mood for most of the duration of illness symptoms include hallucinations and delusions faces speak in blood weeping down walls for most of the duration of illness fear and disgust war in people’s eyes faces speak in blood weeping down walls threats ripple from twisted crimson lips fear and disgust war in people’s eyes furtive glances dart past the undesirable threats ripple from twisted crimson lips blurred human faces meld slowly into view furtive glances dart past the undesirable a single pair of piercing eyes lingers blurred human faces meld slowly into view what are you seeing on that wall? a single pair of piercing eyes lingers the invitation goes unanswered what are you seeing on that wall there’s no observable response the invitation goes unanswered unfounded fears appear to worsen there’s no observable response patient presents as a complex puzzle unfounded fears appear to worsen catatonic behaviour and depressed mood
The DSM (latest edition: DSM-5-TR, published in March 2022) has names and classifications for behaviour that falls outside the generally accepted margins.
Yet, even with all these standardised designations, psychiatrists sometimes still struggle to attach the ‘right’ label to their patients.
Because mental patients are people. Not statistics. We don’t fit neatly into boxes, no matter how convenient that would be.
My poem axis of reality looks back on the years I spent in a mental hospital, back in the 1980s. The bafflement of my psychiatrist and other staff. The fear and disgust of my fellow patients who made no secret of the fact that my catatonic episodes scared the shit out of them.
Even inside, I still felt like an outsider looking in.
At least my psychiatrist wasn’t scared or disgusted. He never gave up on me. If not for him, I don’t know if I’d have ever made it out.
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