paranoia – Novelist of YA Psychological Mysteries, YA Fantasy Books & Dark Noir Suspense Thrillers

When the Brain Hears Danger: Auditory Processing, Trauma, and the Story Behind It

Sound is supposed to be simple. A phone rings, someone speaks, music plays in another room, or a door closes somewhere down the hall. We hear it, recognize it, and move on. But the act of hearing is far more complicated than sound entering our ears. The brain has to separate competing noises, recognize patterns, attach meaning to words, decide what deserves attention, and discard what doesn’t. When something interferes with that process, a perfectly ordinary sound can become confusing, exhausting, overwhelming, or quite possibly, even threatening.

That territory fascinated me while writing my newest novel, Call Waiting. In the novel, Londyn Andrews begins hearing voices when she’s placed on hold. Doctors attempt to explain what is happening to her as auditory processing trauma. In Londyn’s world, that explanation seems almost reasonable. Until the voices begin saying things they shouldn’t possibly know.

Before talking about the fiction, though, I wanted to explore the very real science underneath it. First, an Important Distinction: Auditory processing trauma isn’t an established medical diagnosis. I use the phrase fictionally in Call Waiting because it describes the intersection I wanted to explore: trauma, memory, attention, fear, and the way the brain interprets sound.

There are, however, several very real conditions and phenomena that overlap with this idea. One is Auditory Processing Disorder, often called APD or Central Auditory Processing Disorder. A person with APD may have normal hearing on a standard hearing test but still have difficulty making sense of auditory information. The problem is not necessarily whether the ears can detect the sound. It is what the nervous system does with that sound afterward.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association describes central auditory processing as involving the brain’s ability to discriminate sounds, determine where sounds originate, recognize auditory patterns, process timing information, and understand speech when competing or degraded sounds are present.

Trauma introduces another layer. Research involving post-traumatic stress has found differences in sensory and cognitive processing, including heightened responsiveness to threatening or unexpected stimuli, exaggerated startle responses, hypervigilance, difficulty filtering irrelevant information, and altered responses to auditory stimuli. In other words, sometimes the problem isn’t simply: Can I hear this? It can become: What does my brain think this sound means? That question became central to Call Waiting.

How Many People Are Affected? This is where numbers become complicated. Because diagnostic criteria for APD vary considerably, prevalence estimates vary too. Reviews have estimated APD at roughly 0.5–1% of the general population, while some estimates among children fall around 2–5%. Prevalence also appears to increase substantially among older adults, although estimates differ depending upon how auditory processing difficulties are defined and tested.

A 2026 review emphasized an important problem: there’s still considerable disagreement about diagnostic criteria, particularly in children, and APD symptoms can overlap with language disorders, attention difficulties, dyslexia, and other conditions. Adult prevalence is even harder to pin down. Research has produced widely varying estimates, and standardized information for adults younger than sixty remains limited.

There also isn’t a reliable prevalence figure for “trauma-related auditory processing problems” as one unified condition, because that isn’t a single diagnosis. Trauma may instead appear through PTSD symptoms, hypervigilance, sound sensitivity, tinnitus, hyperacusis, concentration problems, or difficulty filtering sensory information. That uncertainty interested me as a novelist. There are experiences people can describe very clearly even when medicine doesn’t have one convenient label that explains them all.

When Does It Begin? Auditory processing difficulties can have different origins. Some appear developmentally during childhood. Others may emerge or become more noticeable later in life. Acquired auditory-processing problems have been associated with neurological illness, aging, and traumatic brain injury.

ASHA notes that auditory problems following traumatic brain injury can include difficulty listening in background noise, maintaining attention, remembering spoken information, and following multistep verbal instructions. Importantly, those symptoms may arise from auditory-processing deficits, broader cognitive effects of brain injury, emotional conditions such as PTSD, or some combination of them.

Psychological trauma presents a different mechanism. Someone with PTSD may become unusually alert to environmental cues associated with danger. A sound that another person barely registers—a slammed door, footsteps, an alarm, a particular tone of voice—may trigger an intense physiological response because the nervous system has learned an association between that sound and threat. Research into PTSD has repeatedly documented exaggerated startle and hypervigilance, including heightened responses to unexpected noises. The ears may be functioning normally, but the brain is simply no longer treating the sound as neutral.

What Can It Feel Like? Auditory-processing difficulties don’t look identical from person to person, but commonly reported problems can include:

* difficulty understanding speech when several people are talking
* trouble following rapid speech
* needing people to repeat themselves
* difficulty following lengthy verbal directions
* struggling to understand conversation in restaurants or other noisy places
* confusing similar sounds or words
* feeling mentally exhausted from listening
* difficulty determining where a sound came from
* remembering only portions of something that was said

APD can exist even when standard hearing thresholds appear normal. Trauma-related auditory reactions can feel different. Hypervigilance may cause someone to continually scan the environment for sound. Unexpected noises may produce an exaggerated startle response. Certain sounds may become emotionally loaded because they are associated with previous experiences.

There are also separate sound-tolerance conditions such as hyperacusis, in which ordinary sounds can seem painfully or intolerably loud; misophonia, involving intense reactions to particular sounds; phonophobia, involving fear of sounds; and broader noise sensitivity. These terms describe different experiences and shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.

Researchers have even documented persistent sound hypersensitivity following head trauma, accompanied in some patients by concentration problems, memory difficulties, anxiety, and increased sensitivity to stress. That combination—sound, memory, anxiety, interpretation—is precisely the space where fiction began taking over for me.

The Belief That “I’m Hearing Things”: One of the most interesting aspects of auditory perception is how rapidly the brain turns sound into meaning. We don’t experience speech as a collection of frequencies. We experience a person saying something. The brain fills gaps, predicts, filters, compares incoming information with memory, and decides which sound matters and which can disappear into the background. That can create a frightening disconnect when someone knows that they heard something but can’t understand why everyone else seems to have experienced the same environment differently.

It is important, however, not to equate auditory-processing problems with hallucinations. APD concerns difficulty processing actual auditory information. Hallucinations involve perceiving sound without a corresponding external auditory stimulus. Trauma responses, tinnitus, hearing disorders, neurological conditions, medication effects, sleep deprivation, and psychiatric conditions can produce very different auditory experiences, which is why unexplained symptoms deserve proper medical evaluation rather than self-diagnosis. But as a novelist, I became interested in the terrifying question between those categories: What happens when someone can no longer determine which explanation fits?

Can Trauma Change the Way We Listen? Research increasingly suggests that stress can influence auditory perception. A 2026 review examining acute and chronic stress described evidence that stress can influence auditory processing through multiple neural mechanisms, including interactions involving auditory networks and brain regions involved in emotion and threat detection. The authors emphasized that chronic stress may produce longer-lasting changes in auditory coding and perception.

Research on PTSD has likewise found abnormalities in attention to auditory information and in the brain’s response to both trauma-related and neutral sounds. This doesn’t mean trauma routinely causes people to hear nonexistent voices. It means something subtler and perhaps more fascinating. Trauma can change what the brain notices, ignores, labels as dangerous, and how strongly it reacts.

How Are Auditory Processing Problems Treated? There’s no single treatment because there’s no single presentation. For diagnosed APD, ASHA describes three broad management approaches that are frequently used together: modifying the listening environment, directly training specific auditory skills, and teaching compensatory strategies that help a person recover information they may have missed. That might mean reducing competing background noise, improving the quality of the auditory signal, using visual information along with spoken instructions, requesting repetition or clarification, strengthening memory and attention strategies, or undertaking individualized auditory training. Treatment should be tailored to the person’s specific deficits rather than assuming everyone with listening difficulties needs the same intervention.

When trauma or PTSD is contributing to sensory hyperarousal, treatment targets the trauma itself rather than treating the experience simply as an auditory disorder. The VA/DoD clinical guidelines identify Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, and EMDR among the trauma-focused psychotherapies with the strongest research support for PTSD.

Someone experiencing new or unexplained changes in hearing, speech comprehension, sound tolerance, memory, or auditory perception should begin with a qualified healthcare professional. Depending on the symptoms, evaluation may involve an audiologist as well as neurological, psychological, speech-language, or other specialists.

And Then There Is Call Waiting. This is where I allowed reality to open the door for fiction. Londyn Andrews doesn’t hear the voices during ordinary conversation. She hears them when she’s on hold. That strange suspended place between dialing and speaking, connection and disconnection, and someone being there and no one answering.

At first, there are explanations: stress, trauma, and an auditory-processing problem. Something her brain is constructing from fragments of sound. Londyn wants to believe those explanations because they belong to a world she understands. Then the voices become specific. They belong to people in hospital rooms, accident scenes, motel bathrooms, near bridges and dark water, which are all instances where people may be suspended somewhere between life and death.

And eventually the impossible becomes personal. Londyn’s estranged mother, Georgia Bickford, enters hospice. While Londyn is waiting on another call, she hears a voice she knows immediately. Her own. Not the woman she is now. The girl she used to be. And that younger version of Londyn gives her a warning: Get the truth before your mother dies.

Suddenly, Call Waiting becomes about much more than mysterious voices. It’s about the things families refuse to say. The memories we reinterpret in order to survive them. The way childhood experiences can remain buried until some tiny sensory detail—a voice, a ring, a click, a few seconds of silence—brings everything rushing back. And the terrifying possibility that sometimes what we dismiss as noise contains the thing we’ve spent our entire lives trying not to hear.

The Brain Is Always Listening. The real science of auditory processing is fascinating precisely because hearing isn’t passive. Our brains constantly sort, prioritize, predict, interpret, and connect sound with memory. Trauma can complicate that process. Neurological conditions can complicate it. Attention can complicate it. Age, injury, stress, environment, and emotion can all influence the experience of listening.

The forthcoming fiction novel Call Waiting takes that reality and pushes it beyond the boundary of what science can explain. Because Londyn’s greatest problem isn’t that she hears voices. It is that eventually she has to decide whether they are symptoms or witnesses. And whether the one voice she has spent her whole life avoiding belongs to her mother, the dead, or herself.

The Language of Survival: On Mental Illness, Resilience, and First Love

I’ve always believed that the most courageous stories are not about rescue, but about return—how we come back to ourselves after the mind has turned against us. When I write about mental illness, I don’t write from a distance. I write from the thin edge of it—from the quiet hours where thought unravels and the only lifeline is language. Each of my novels—Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak—was born out of that liminal space between fear and faith, between survival and surrender.

These books aren’t companions by chronology, but by spirit. Each follows a young woman whose inner world threatens to eclipse the outer one, and each discovers that love—whether romantic, platonic, or self-forged—is the most powerful form of recovery we have.

1. The Mind as Haunted House: Secret Whispers

When I wrote Secret Whispers, I began with an image: a house stitched together by secrets, its silence louder than any scream. Inside it lives Adria—a painter, sister, caretaker, and reluctant witness to her own unraveling.

Schizophrenia shadows her family line, coiling like a whispered curse. Her brother’s breakdown has already split the household in half. Her mother holds everything together with brittle faith. And Adria, caught between caretaking and collapse, begins to hear the same whispers that once took him away.

I wanted to write honestly about what it means to live with a mind you can’t fully trust—the terror of not knowing whether what you see is symptom or sight. But I also wanted to write about love: the improbable, incandescent kind that dares to root itself in fractured soil.

In Secret Whispers, love doesn’t save Adria. It steadies her. The boy who sees her—awkward, hopeful, honest—doesn’t fix her illness; he becomes a mirror in which she can see more than diagnosis. Their love flickers like a candle in a draft, fragile yet real, proof that connection is possible even when perception splinters.

Adria’s resilience isn’t loud. It’s made of small gestures: washing a brush, opening a window, whispering not today when the shadows come. Recovery, I learned while writing her, is not a staircase but a spiral—you circle the same fears until you finally face them without flinching.

2. Déjà Vu: The Loops of the Bipolar Mind

If Secret Whispers was about hearing too much, Déjà Vu was about feeling too much—about living inside a mind where memory and mania blur.

Ivy Lancaster is eighteen, brilliant, impulsive, and newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She experiences life in echoes: every stranger’s face feels familiar, every nightmare seems rehearsed, every choice loops back like a record caught on its scratch.

The first time I wrote Ivy walking through the parking lot at dawn, barefoot and disoriented, I felt the pulse of the entire novel—this young woman spinning in the orbit of her own brain, terrified of herself yet desperate to be believed.

Déjà Vu is not just a psychological thriller; it’s an emotional x-ray of bipolarity. Mania is painted not as glamour but as velocity—the thrill that burns. Depression is written not as stillness but as suffocation. Yet in between, there’s the quiet miracle of awareness.

And there is love. Love arrives in Ivy’s world not as romance, but as recognition: people who refuse to define her by her disorder, who remind her that she exists beyond chemical imbalance. Love, in this book, is accountability—the friend who says take your meds, the parent who whispers you are more than your mind, the stranger who looks her in the eye when she feels invisible.

Resilience here is not recovery in the clinical sense. It’s survival as rebellion. It’s Ivy saying, I may live inside loops, but I can still choose where to step next.

When readers tell me Déjà Vu helped them feel seen—that it mirrored their manic spirals or the hollow aftermath—I’m reminded why I write these stories. To dismantle stigma. To remind us that living with mental illness is not a flaw in character, but a feat of endurance.

3. Of Laughter & Heartbreak: OCD and the Art of Staying

By the time I wrote Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I wanted to explore a different texture of the mind: the obsessive, ritualized patterns of control that masquerade as safety.

Stevie Matthews is almost sixteen. Her thoughts arrive like barbed wire; her rituals multiply like vines. When the summer’s order collapses, she’s hospitalized—a space she never asked for, but where, for the first time, she meets others who understand the language of compulsion.

OCD, for Stevie, is both prison and prayer. Her rituals aren’t about superstition; they’re about trying to keep the world from shattering. I wrote her story as both confession and communion—a letter to anyone who’s ever mistaken coping for control.

Behind those locked doors, Stevie meets her mirror selves: the anxious boy who collects facts like talismans, the quiet girl who hides notes to her future self, the nurse who knows that healing isn’t linear. Together they build something like family—a map stitched from shared fragments of hope.

This novel, like the others, carries the pulse of first love—not in grand gestures, but in small acts of belief. The hand that steadies hers during a panic spiral. The smile that says you are not too much. The love that grows not in spite of illness, but within it. Because love, at its truest, doesn’t demand wholeness—it meets you in the fragments and stays.

4. The Quiet Revolution of Survival

Each of these novels began with illness, but each ends with something larger: a reclamation of humanity.

In Secret Whispers, Adria learns that her art can hold what her mind cannot.
In Déjà Vu, Ivy redefines truth beyond the lens of mania.
In Of Laughter & Heartbreak, Stevie learns that control is not safety, and surrender is not defeat.

Together, they form a kind of triptych about resilience—the quiet kind that never makes headlines. They remind me that mental illness and first love often share the same vocabulary: vulnerability, risk, surrender, trust. Both require standing on the edge of the unknown and saying yes anyway.

To live with a brain that misfires is to live constantly between worlds—the real and the imagined, the lucid and the lost. Yet within that space, there’s beauty. There’s empathy. There’s art.

These are not stories about being cured. They’re stories about being human.

5. Why I Keep Writing

Sometimes readers ask why I return, again and again, to characters who struggle with their minds. My answer is simple: because I know what it means to stay.

Because the world still whispers that mental illness is weakness.
Because the stories that saved me were the ones that refused to flinch.
Because the young readers who see themselves in Adria, Ivy, and Stevie deserve to know they are not broken—they are becoming.

Writing these books has taught me that resilience isn’t the absence of relapse; it’s the decision to keep loving life anyway. It’s the courage to reach for connection even when your hands shake. It’s the soft defiance of building hope out of symptoms.

And maybe, at the center of it all, it’s first love—the thing that reminds us we’re still capable of wonder.

When I look back on Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I see not a trilogy of illness, but a mosaic of endurance. Each girl walks through her own labyrinth and emerges carrying the same small flame: belief.

Belief that we are more than diagnosis.
Belief that love is still possible in the dark.
Belief that the quiet work of staying—of waking up again, and again—is itself a form of grace.

If these stories have a single message, it’s this:
Even when the mind fractures, the heart remembers how to reach for light.

Writing the Nightmare: How Long Since Buried Became My Way Back to Light

When I was twelve, I began dreaming of being hunted.

It wasn’t the kind of nightmare that dissolves with morning light. These dreams followed me—in hallways, in car rides, in the spaces between waking and sleep. In them, I was always running. Sometimes, I saw who chased me; in others, there were only the shadows gathering at the edges, the sound of breath too close behind.

Therapists would later call it trauma’s echo, the body remembering what the mind couldn’t articulate. But at the time, I just called it fear. It clung to my ribs for decades, shapeshifting—into insomnia, perfectionism, silence. When I finally began therapy as an adult, my sessions became less about remembering events and more about re-entering the emotional rooms I’d locked shut. Those rooms were crowded with ghosts, but also with stories waiting to be told.

That’s where Long Since Buried was born—not as a thriller at first, but as a reckoning.

The Fiction That Remembered Me

I didn’t sit down to write a murder mystery. I sat down to write about a feeling I couldn’t escape—the sense of being watched, pursued, never quite safe in my own skin.

In Long Since Buried, twelve-year-old Sydney dies during what should have been an ordinary spring day in South Dakota. Thirty years later, her newly discovered twin, Laci, returns to the same town to unravel what happened. Two women, two timelines—one silenced, one searching.

When I began, I didn’t realize how closely those sisters mirrored the split inside me. Sydney became the self that never got to speak, the child frozen in that recurring nightmare. Laci became the adult voice, trying to rewrite what the dream refused to release.

I remember writing late into the night, hands trembling, feeling the same chill I had as a child. The words felt like digging—not for a plot twist, but for buried truth. I didn’t outline the story. It unfolded the way memory does—fragmented, looping, unreliable. Each chapter was a séance, calling forth pieces of the past I’d long since buried under survival instinct.

When Therapy Meets the Page

Over the years, therapy taught me how to sit with the body’s reactions—the quickened pulse, the tightening throat—without letting them drown me. Writing taught me how to translate those sensations into language. Between the two, I found a strange kind of balance: psychology as scaffold, story as sanctuary.

The sessions and the drafts often overlapped. One week, I’d describe the recurring dream to my therapist—the smell of dirt and spent ammo with its sulfurous, metallic odor, the sound of footsteps, the desperate wish to turn and face what chased me. The next week, I’d find that same image emerging in the manuscript—but this time, under my control. I could decide what happened when I turned around.

That was yet another time I realized that fiction could be a survival tool—not a means of escape, but a way to return to the site of the wound with agency. In writing, I was both hunted and hunter, both lost girl and adult author mapping the terrain of her own memory.

In this way, Long Since Buried became an act of reclamation disguised as suspense.

The Town as Mirror

The fictionalized setting—Watertown, South Dakota—is more than a backdrop. It’s a possible mirror of containment and repression. On the surface, it’s idyllic: lakeside weddings, small-town gossip, the scent of lilacs after rain. But underneath, everyone knows something they won’t say out loud. Everyone carries their own secret version of the truth.

That, too, came from life. The unspoken rules of small communities. The polite silences that can hide harm. The way a family can appear whole from the outside while cracking beneath the weight of what’s unsaid.

When I described the town, I was also describing the psychological landscape of trauma—beautiful, familiar, and haunted. The serenity of the lake juxtaposed against the violence beneath its reflection. The wedding festivities standing as fragile rituals of denial.

Readers often tell me the book feels cinematic—as if the town itself were breathing. I think that’s because every building, every echo, every whispered conversation was built from memory’s architecture.

The Child Who Was Hunted

During therapy, I realized that the nightmares of being hunted were never about literal pursuit. They were metaphors for the feeling of being unsafe in my own story. The faceless hunter was every force—societal, familial, internal—that told me to stay small, quiet, compliant.

When I wrote Sydney, I gave that hunted girl a name, a world, and eventually, a voice that transcended death. Her chapters are written from the past, but they hum with an afterlife’s awareness. Through her, I could finally face the forest—not as prey, but as witness.

The process wasn’t easy. Writing Long Since Buried often meant reliving the old panic. I’d have to step away, breathe, ground myself in the present—feeling my feet, naming five blue things in the room. But each time I returned to the keyboard, I felt a little stronger. The page became a threshold: on one side, fear; on the other, creation.

The Adult Who Returns

Laci’s sections—the modern-day timeline—are my love letter to persistence. She’s not fearless; she’s relentless. Her investigation isn’t just about uncovering who killed her twin. It’s about confronting the emotional debris that lingers when truth has been buried too long.

Writing her reminded me that healing is never about erasing what happened; it’s about learning to carry it differently.

I gave Laci my own instincts—her tendency to overanalyze, her compulsion to observe, her need to understand why. I also gave her what I wish I’d had sooner: a sense of permission to look, even when others warned her not to.

Through her, I could finally answer the question the nightmare always posed: What happens if I stop running?

The Silence After the Gunshot

There’s a moment in the first draft—quiet, almost imperceptible—where time seems to stop. A gunshot echoes. The scene goes still. My first readers describe it as eerie, cinematic. For me, it was cathartic.

That silence after the shot became symbolic: the stillness that follows a trauma before the mind rushes to fill in the blanks. In that pause, the reader and I share the same breath—both of us listening for what comes next.

And what comes next, in fiction and in life, is always the same: choice. Do we remain buried in the narrative others wrote for us, or do we dig our way toward our own version of truth?

Writing as Resurrection

I used to think writing about pain would make it permanent. But I’ve learned it can do the opposite. When we give shape to what haunts us, we reclaim it. We define it before it defines us.

In that way, Long Since Buried became both elegy and resurrection. It honored the frightened twelve-year-old who couldn’t wake herself from the dream, while allowing the adult me to finish the story on her own terms.

The nightmares still visit sometimes, though less frequently now. When they do, I no longer wake in panic. I reach for a notebook. I listen. I write. Because I’ve learned that every dream, even the terrifying ones, contains a fragment of language waiting to be set free.

Why I Still Write the Dark

Readers often ask why I continue to write thrillers—why I linger in the dark when I’ve already survived it. The answer is simple: because the dark is where I found my voice.

The shadows aren’t just where fear lives; they’re also where empathy grows. In exploring human darkness—greed, guilt, survival, grief—I’ve learned to honor the complexity of being alive.

For me, Long Since Buried isn’t just a story of murder or revenge. It’s a story of reclamation—of what happens when a girl who once dreamed of being hunted becomes the woman who writes the ending.

That’s the true closure fiction gives us: not a perfect resolution, but a language for what once felt unspeakable.

Sometimes the stories that terrify us are the ones that most need to be written.
Sometimes the only way out of a nightmare is through the page.

And when we finally reach the end—when the words fall quiet and the ghosts rest easy—we realize we were never being hunted by monsters.
We were being pursued by our own courage, waiting for us to stop running and turn toward it.

The Language of Healing: Finding Words for the Unspeakable

There are wounds that refuse to speak in complete sentences. They hum beneath the skin, pulsing with memory, waiting for a language tender enough to hold them. For years, I mistook my silence for strength. I believed that if I didn’t name the pain, it couldn’t touch me. But silence, I learned, is its own kind of bruise—one that deepens in the dark.

Writing became my way of translating ache into alphabet. In Nostalgic Tendencies, Idyllic Endeavors & Current Inclinations, I began experimenting with what healing might sound like if given voice. I wasn’t trying to craft perfection; I was trying to survive. Each essay attempted to name something that had long lived without language—the complicated inheritance of womanhood, the confusion of growing up inside both trauma and tenderness, the way love and loss often share the same room.

The alphabetic structure of that book—A to Z—was more than a creative choice. It was a lifeline. Some days, I could only manage a single word: Ache. Anger. Acceptance. Other days, I could stretch into sentences. By giving shape to the unspeakable, I was teaching myself how to live with it. Naming became an act of reclamation; description became a prayer.

Later, in Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, I found that healing sometimes requires fewer words, not more. Depression dismantled grammar; mindfulness rebuilt it one breath at a time. When I was too exhausted to write paragraphs, I wrote sensations instead: the hum of the refrigerator, the pulse in my wrists, the sparrow outside the window refusing to give up its song. I learned that attention itself is a language—one that says, I see you. I’m still here.

That book explored the intersection between narrative and neurobiology — how the act of observing, naming, and breathing can rewire a weary mind. Where Nostalgic Tendencies dissected the emotional architecture of becoming, Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was about learning to dwell inside the body again, to replace self-critique with curiosity.

Words, I realized, are not cures. They’re companions. They sit beside the wound, whispering, You are not alone. The act of writing them—or reading them—becomes a ceremony of recognition. There’s something almost sacred about saying the truth out loud, even if it trembles. Because once a story is spoken, it stops being a secret.

Healing, I’ve learned, has its own dialect—part ink, part silence. It’s the pause between paragraphs, the tremor before truth, the deep exhale after naming something that once terrified you. And when we find that dialect—when we learn to speak our pain without fear of breaking the room—something miraculous happens: the language begins to speak us back into being.

Maybe this is why we keep writing, even when it hurts. Because language is how we build a bridge from what was unbearable to what might be beautiful again.

Secret Whispers book trailer

Some Reasons Why There Is Such a Stigma Around Mental Health Problems

Fear of being hurt by the sufferer is one such reason there is stigma about mental health issues. Most people with mental illness aren’t dangerous. And if they are, it’s a danger to themselves. My psychiatrist once said that mental illness doesn’t cause a person to be violent if they didn’t already have that trait.

Contagiousness is another aspect of stigma. People don’t want to catch the mental illness. Sure, they know they can’t catch it, but they worry something similar or lesser may happen to them if they have to think about it. That’s not how a chemical imbalance in the brain works. It’s nature and part nurture that determine if you’ll have mental illness issues. If you see someone with severe depression or mania and then come down with it yourself, it’s because of genetics and/or your environment that brough it on.

News stories are another trigger of stigma. When there is a shooting or other major crime, the first person the public point fingers at is the people with mental illness such as schizophrenia. That’s farthest from the truth that the mentally ill are inclined to do such damage to others. Those with schizophrenia seek to hide their condition from others and go out of their way to distance themselves from scrutiny so it does not shine the light on their illness. Like I said above, if a person with mental illness is violent, that trait was already there before they were diagnosed which means that shooting or other major crime could’ve been committed by non-sufferers just as likely.

Book review: The Place Between Breaths by An Na

Atheneum, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, 2018

This little, cerebral thriller of a book packs a punch. However, there’s a few things to consider before you read it. It is a book about mental health and schizophrenia. It is not a fluffy cuddly book. This one bites, and confuses. The author has South Korean origins, meaning that the Eastern influences are heavy in the writing style of the book. And why do I say both things before I even review the book? Because if you’re expecting a perfectly “coherent” fluffy book, this book is not it and it definitely isn’t a Western view of the world even if it is set in the US.

Throughout the novel we get to know Grace, who saw her mother deteriorate in the grips of schizophrenia, and then ultimately disappear from her life. Her mother has never been found, which has led Grace’s father on a desperate quest to find a cure for this debilitating illness. Grace interns at the lab where her father works. He is a headhunter, bringing in the top scientists from around the world to join forces in search of the key that will unlock a cure for Grace’s mother—the love of his life—if only they could find her.

This is a non-linear novel that uses the seasons of the year to anchor you in the story. Na is a master of imagery and it felt to me that her arresting descriptions of the weather coincided with Grace’s moods and mental state. I could be reading too much into it, but nothing in this book felt accidental.

In addition to jumping back and forth between the seasons and around in the story, the reader is also left to parse between reality and delusion. This made for an intriguing and gut-wrenching, but unenjoyable read. Though, I would argue that “enjoyable” was not the goal, and for this I was glad.

Though a novel, this did not read like an attempt to make schizophrenia into entertainment. This felt like a deft effort to bring understanding to an illness that continues to be misunderstood, despite decades of research. The portrayal of this mental illness and how it breaks the mind apart from the inside out was honest and elegant. It does not glorify the disease but rather exposes it in all its gruesome tragedy.

It was definitely worth the read, and I believe an important work for helping people understand what schizophrenia looks like from the inside out. It’s a confusing illness, and to wrap up the story with a neat little bow would have been disingenuous. In the end, I appreciated the beauty and tragedy, and clarity and confusion Na wove together to create this novel. There are a lot of twists and intriguing bits in the story where at first you aren’t sure but as the story progresses you begin to realize how much Grace is fighting and what “enemy” she’s fighting. In my opinion it was a clever book with the way it sets things and how it leaves you guessing

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Secret Whispers available on 04/11/21

A beautiful family hiding dysfunction.

A house full of secrets.

An intelligent, creative, and schizophrenic girl.

An awkward, awesome, zealous boy.

Noxious peers. Worse high school. Embarrassing moments.

Danger lurks. Young love. Reality?

What befalls one on an unraveling journey? And what is it like to question one’s own sanity? Adria is a high school junior with a penchant for painting and a clear goal: to hide the changes from anyone and everyone. In reality, she’s just developing schizophrenia. Genes are not in Adria’s corner. With an uncle as well as an older brother with paranoid schizophrenia, she’s got the family ties that make her life a challenge. Not that she needs any more stress. As the primary caregiver to her younger siblings, Adria’s life couldn’t be anything less than jam-packed and ready to implode. Adria must choose whether to risk everything, including her sanity and a first love, in a desperate attempt to save her family from the evil that stalks them.

Then there’s Ben, an awkward average teen but totally in awe at what he sees in Adria: a curious, quirky, and calm-natured dream that just applied for a job at the same store. He can’t help but be magnetically drawn to everything that is Adria, whom he meets when the odds are against her: in school, at their part-time job, and at home, especially. Little does he know her outward deficiencies are only the tip of the iceberg. Will he save the girl of his dreams, or is she destined to falter and pull him under with her when her mental health condition triggers.

Angela Grey, a writer with paranoid schizophrenia,, OCD, PTSD, and social anxiety, whom herself spent time in a psychiatric hospital, has created a memorable moving tale about the sometimes unexpected and challenging road to first love.

Category: paranoia