The Internet is giving all sorts of people the voice that they never would have received otherwise. Society tends to listen to certain perspectives while discarding many others, and the perspective of addicts and people who are suffering from mental illness tend to get lost. Works like this autobiography might help to change all of that.
An Addict’s Autobiography
Author Rachael Hein is working on a biography about her own experiences with Bipolar disorder and substance abuse in the Kickstarter autobiography that she is trying to fund here:
However, she has much broader ambitions than simply telling her own story. Rachael Hein is interested in helping to change society’s perceptions of drug addicts and the mentally ill in general, partly through telling her own story and partly through helping people really understand what the stigma is like.
There is no doubt about the fact that the word ‘crazy’ is thrown around like confetti, and that a lot of people do not consider it to be a real slur. Society tends to criminalize certain types of mental illness, such as drug addiction, rather than getting the people involved the help that they truly need. These sorts of measures perpetuate the problem for society at large. They also make things much worse for the individuals themselves.
Rachael Hein is at least lucky enough to have received treatment, and is still in the process of healing. However, she recognizes that a lot of people are not nearly as lucky as her. This autobiography is not the sort of thing that is purely about self-expression, although that is certainly going to be part of it. This is an autobiography that was written according to a very particular historical context, which should give it that much more relevance to the people who might be interested in reading the finished product.