Hello Invisible Illness!
Periodically we like to reach out to share updates about what’s happening at Invisible Illness, Medium’s largest mental health publication. Thanks to your amazing writing (and reading!) our latest happy update is: we’re growing.
We’re now a team of 4 editors. Joining Meredith and Ryan are two new editors whose names might already be familiar to you, as they’ve both been active contributors to the publication for some time.
Marie Raven is an American expat in Norway, living with her Norwegian husband and two American cats. She’s child-free, a lifelong writer, an avid knitter, a trained vocalist, and a serious coffee drinker.
Marie was diagnosed with clinical depression in adolescence and had a bad experience in treatment which has driven her to seek healthier outlooks concerning mental illness and wellness in individuals and communities. She believes in storytelling as the best tool to learn, grow, heal, and create.
When she’s not writing nonfiction, she’s working on speculative fiction and horror stories. She’s been volunteering as a municipal liaison for National Novel Writing Month since 2010 because she loves nothing more than facilitating writers. Marie’s favorite color is red and her favorite dinosaur is stegosaurus.
Juliette Roanoke lives in Atlanta, Georgia, is a mother, registered nurse specializing in neuroscience and critical care, writer, and an avid runner. As a clinician, she is most passionate about advocating for those who cannot do so for themselves. She is determined to break down barriers keeping so many from receiving proper psychiatric treatment and is fueled by her frustrations related to the inequalities of access to quality healthcare.
She was raised by a mother who suffered from several mental health disorders, has a daughter with early-onset bipolar disorder, and suffers from several conditions herself, including schizoaffective disorder, narcolepsy, OCD, as well as several exposures to trauma. Due to the complex array of these conditions, she wants more than anything for people to continue to battle their way towards cures, remission, and peace. She firmly believes that, with enough work, feeling mentally ill does not have to be anyone’s permanent baseline.
Introducing Columnists
In addition to growing our editor pool, we’re also experimenting with a new feature on Invisible Illness: columns. Our first two new columnists are Nikki Kay and Mason Sabre, two writers with a passion for mental health education.
Nikki Kay is a parent, writer and educator living outside Boston, MA, US. She only fully began coming to terms with her history of abuse, mental unwellness, and trauma after a traumatic experience as an adult led her to seek therapy. She uses her past experiences to guide her decisions in raising her own children, one of whom struggles with mental health and learning issues. Nikki is passionate about raising self-aware children who can talk about and regulate their feelings, and is committed to helping more adults reach the point where they can do the same. She has experienced invisible illness from multiple perspectives: as a survivor, educator, parent, and former clinician.
Her work deals with the psyche’s response to trauma and explores its invisible interconnection with beliefs and behavior.
Aside from being a writer, Mason Sabre is a parent, a teacher and a good listener. He lives in the North of England with his wife and various four-legged creatures. Mason has a keen interest in mental health and mental illness, and this 2020 will see him run the London marathon to raise money for a Mental Health charity.
Mental illness and health have always been a big part of his life. His first experience of mental illness was through his parents and living with the repercussions of his mother’s postnatal depression. Later, it was his own diagnoses of depression and OCD that led him on an adventure to understand mental illness better, including gaining a degree in Neuropsychology.
Mason believes that the key to mental wellness is understanding oneself and accepting whatever that might mean. He writes and raises money for mental illness with the hope that one day, through better education, people will understand the mental illness of themselves and others around them.
Nikki and Mason’s bi-weekly columns will launch in the next week. Keep an eye out for it!
Have a great week everyone,
