Wales High School

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It's the year 2003. Teenagers are messaging each other online, listening to punk music on MP3 players, and writing blogs on LiveJournal to fit in. One such teen is walking the halls of Wales High School with bright shirts, leather jackets, and blue hair: Jacques Peters. He's determined to become best friends with one of the coolest guys in school, Davis Mavis. But he soon discovers that smoking, skipping class, and putting up a front aren't as cool as they seem, particularly when mental health is involved. His friends gossip behind his back, push him out of their clique, and turn a blind eye to the cuts on his wrists. He's dragged into a life that leads to a long stay in a psychiatric ward he hates, full of therapy, pills, and a strict routine. That troubled teen is me. When I was discharged, I was in a daze. Numbed by medication and left with few friends, I spent my days listening to music and giving my teachers lip. Eventually, on a cold winter night home alone, I posted a single word on my blog: "goodbye." I took a cocktail of pills and hoped to slip into an endless sleep.

WALES HIGH SCHOOL: FIRST DIAGNOSIS is a creative memoir about my mental health struggle as a troubled teen. My story will resonate with both teenagers struggling with mental illness and parents seeking to understand their children's needs. I am a therapist, a disability rights advocate, and a language scholar. I have two self-published books, University on Watch: Crisis in the Academy and Small Fingernails: Even Less Love, and my article Decriminalizing Mental Illness was recently published by NAMI in the magazine "Advocate" in Spring 2019.