Patrick Dylan joins the voices calling for an end to the stigma surrounding mental illness. He and his wife, Mia, live in Florida and have two college-age children. They hope that sharing their family’s story will spread awareness of the realities of mental illness and offer support to others who are either experiencing a mental health crisis or providing care to an affected loved one.
Greg Payan was born and raised in Queens, NY. While currently working full time as a journalist, fate intervened when his then partner, now wife, was struck by a sudden brain hemorrhage. He detailed the health crisis in his memoir, Please Stay (2018), his only full-length book. Employing actual correspondence which updated friends, colleagues and loved ones through long emails at the end of each of 24 ICU days; text messages sent back and forth to to family as things unfolded; and photos documenting events as they happened the reader experiences the fears and prayers of all involved in a medical crisis.
Please Stay is a book that one person described as ‘more of a love letter at times, than a memoir.’ It’s a unique story of love and survival
Hey there! I'm Lauren, a multi-faced writer based near Portland, Oregon. I'm the author of Behind the Facade: A Mental Health Memoir, through the darkness, a self-published poetry series, and Pushing the Leaves Aside: A Short Story. I'm also an avid reader and word game enthusiast.
There was so much loveliness surrounding Jocelyn Patten as she grew up in Canada. Having moved to the country from her birthplace of Massachusetts at the age of two, Patten was surrounded by relatives and family friends who supported and loved her. And, yet, despite all this, she fell through the cracks into a world of both numbness and agitation. Family support did not protect her from a life of mental illness. It may have softened it a bit, her landing, but it didn’t prevent any of it, or dictate its course. There are many factors in the development of mental illness, family support being just one of them.
Schooling at first seemed to be okay, but Patten was teased and taunted by the kids around her. And, we realize through the chapters o
