Category: stigma

Every Recording Has a Ghost: When Trauma Changes What We Hear and Remember

There is something unsettling about an old recording. A photograph freezes what someone looked like. A recording does something different. It brings the person back into the room with their breathing, pauses, and hesitation before answering a question. Their voice hasn’t aged even though everyone who heard it the first time has.

That idea sits at the center of my forthcoming, soon-to-be-released novel, Every Recording Has a Ghost, which kept me up nights to complete because of the intensity and proximity the subject is for me. The ghosts in this book aren’t necessarily the kind that walk through walls. Some of them live in memory. Some live in trauma. And some were deliberately put there by other people.

The Real Mental Illness Beneath the Suspense

Every Recording Has a Ghost follows podcaster Remy Ireland as she becomes caught in a mystery involving old cassette recordings, a psychiatric hospital, missing information, manipulated memories, and a past she has never fully escaped.

Remy also lives with something much less mysterious: anxiety. For her, the telephone itself can be a source of dread. Calling a stranger, being transferred, waiting on hold, wondering whether she’s explaining herself correctly, and hearing the ringing continue while she waits for someone to answer. These aren’t supernatural experiences. They’re recognizable forms of anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders involve more than ordinary temporary worry. They can persist, become difficult to control, and interfere with work, relationships, school, and everyday life. NIMH estimates that roughly 31% of American adults experience an anxiety disorder sometime during their lives.

And mental illness as a whole is far from rare. The latest available national survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that 23.4% of U.S. adults—about 61.5 million people—experienced a mental illness during 2024. About 14.6 million experienced a serious mental illness. That means mental illness isn’t some unusual condition belonging only to characters in frightening books. It is part of ordinary families, workplaces, marriages, and lives. That distinction matters to me when I write psychological suspense.

Trauma Doesn’t Always Stay in the Past

One of the ideas running through Every Recording Has a Ghost is that something can be over and still not be finished. Trauma works that way. Someone can leave a hospital, leave a relationship, survive an accident, grow older, move away, build an entirely different life, and still discover that the nervous system remembers things the conscious mind would rather forget.

People exposed to traumatic events can experience anxiety, anger, sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, intrusive thoughts, and heightened reactions afterward. Most people’s reactions lessen with time, but when symptoms persist and significantly interfere with daily functioning, they may become part of post-traumatic stress disorder. People with PTSD can experience frightening memories, emotional numbness or detachment, sleep disturbances, and an exaggerated startle response.

That exaggerated awareness of possible danger is especially important to Remy’s story. Because once someone has learned that something terrible can happen, the brain can become very good at watching for the next terrible thing. A ringing telephone can stop being merely a telephone. A hallway can stop being merely a hallway. A person’s tone of voice can become evidence. And a cassette tape can become something you are almost afraid to play.

When the Brain Starts Searching for Threat

One of the strangest things about anxiety is that it can make uncertainty feel dangerous. You don’t know what the person on the other end of the telephone will say, why someone hasn’t answered, what is hidden on a recording, or whether the pause you heard meant anything. The anxious brain often wants an explanation immediately. And when it doesn’t get one, it starts creating possibilities. What if something happened? What if I misunderstood? What if they are angry? What if I said the wrong thing? What if this means something worse?

That thought pattern can create an exhausting cycle in which uncertainty produces anxiety, anxiety increases vigilance, and vigilance discovers even more things to worry about. It’s one reason Remy’s phone anxiety matters so much to Every Recording Has a Ghost. Her fear isn’t simply a character quirk. It affects the way she investigates. The way she communicates. The way she interprets silence. And sometimes the hardest thing she does isn’t entering an abandoned place or listening to a frightening tape. Sometimes it is simply staying on the telephone.

Memory Is Not a Recording

There is another psychological idea underneath the novel that fascinates me even more. We like to imagine memory as a recording. Something happened. The brain saved it. Years later, we retrieve the file. But human memory doesn’t work exactly that way. Memories can be influenced by attention, emotion, later information, context, suggestion, and the circumstances in which we remember them. That doesn’t mean memory is meaningless. It means memory is human. And that creates frightening possibilities when another person holds authority over the environment in which those memories are being formed.

That possibility becomes much darker inside the psychiatric institution Remy investigates. The hospital archive contains thousands of recordings. Patients were observed, conversations were preserved, identities were manipulated, recordings were edited, and the deeper Remy goes into the archive, the more she begins to understand that the supposedly supernatural story surrounding the hospital may have provided perfect camouflage for something much more human: control.

The Hospital Is Frightening Because People Had Power

I deliberately didn’t want the psychiatric hospital in Every Recording Has a Ghost to be frightening simply because mentally ill people had once lived there. Mental illness isn’t the horror. Vulnerability being exploited is. There is an important difference. The frightening part of the hospital’s history is what can happen when vulnerable people are placed in an environment where someone else controls information, medication, observation, access, interpretation, and authority.

In the novel, sedation, repetition, recorded material, surveillance, and psychological pressure are used together in ways they never should be. It isn’t magic or a supernatural machine capable of instantly controlling someone’s mind; instead, it’s coercion. And that is more disturbing to me. Because human beings don’t need supernatural powers to damage one another. Sometimes they only need access, authority, and someone who isn’t being believed.

What About Hearing Voices?

Because Every Recording Has a Ghost deals so heavily with voices and recordings, there’s another real-world distinction worth making. Hearing a voice that no one else hears can occur as an auditory hallucination. Hallucinations are one possible symptom of psychosis, a group of symptoms involving disrupted perception and thinking and, at times, difficulty distinguishing what is real from what is not. But hearing voices does not automatically mean schizophrenia.

Psychosis can occur in several mental illnesses, and NIMH notes that psychotic symptoms can also be associated with neurological conditions, severe sleep deprivation, some medications, and substance use. A person can also experience psychosis without ultimately being diagnosed with schizophrenia. That distinction is important. Mental illness is far more complicated than the shorthand often used in thrillers and horror stories. And a person experiencing hallucinations is still a person—not a plot device, a threat, or a monster.

In Every Recording Has a Ghost, that uncertainty becomes part of the suspense. When Remy hears something disturbing, the question isn’t automatically: Is she losing her mind? The better questions are: What did she actually hear? Who recorded it? Was it altered? Who wants her to doubt herself? And perhaps most importantly: Who benefits if nobody believes her?

When Other People Define Your Reality

That may be the mental-health theme of this novel that affects me most. There’s something terrifying about being told that your own perception can’t be trusted. Maybe you’re overreacting, misunderstood, remembering it incorrectly. Maybe anxiety is making you imagine things or the recording never said what you thought it said. Sometimes those statements can be true. Anxiety can distort perception. Memory can be imperfect. Mental illness can affect the way someone experiences reality. But those facts can also be weaponized. A person’s diagnosis should never mean that everything they say can automatically be dismissed.

That distinction becomes increasingly important for Remy as she uncovers what happened inside the hospital. Because once people know you’re frightened, anxious, traumatized, or psychologically vulnerable, it becomes very easy for someone acting in bad faith to say: See? That’s why she thinks this happened. And suddenly the illness becomes more believable than the witness.

Why Recordings?

I keep coming back to recordings because they seem permanent. You can doubt a memory, question a witness, and argue about what somebody thought they heard twenty years ago. But then someone presses PLAY. There’s the voice, breath, room noise, interruption, and sentence that shouldn’t be there. And suddenly the past has evidence. At least, we want to believe it does. But recordings can be edited too. They can be taken out of context. Someone can decide when to begin recording and when to stop. A person asking the questions can influence the answers. A tape can preserve the truth. It can also preserve someone’s version of it. That ambiguity is where Every Recording Has a Ghost lives.

The Ghost May Be the Person You Used to Be

There’s another kind of ghost in the novel: the earlier version of ourselves, the nineteen-year-old who was terrified, the person who didn’t know what was happening yet, who believed an authority figure, who kept quiet, and who survived something and then spent years trying to make it smaller. Trauma can create a strange relationship with time. Something that happened decades earlier can suddenly feel emotionally close when a reminder brings it forward. A voice can do that, as can music, a smell, a room, a telephone ringing, or an old cassette with your name written across it.

That is the part of Every Recording Has a Ghost that feels most real to me. We carry earlier versions of ourselves everywhere. Most days they remain quiet. Then something presses PLAY.

Every Recording Has a Ghost

The title began as something eerie. The longer I worked on the book, the more literal it became in a completely different way. Every recording contains someone who no longer exists exactly as they did when it was made. The person has aged, changed, recovered, forgotten, remembered differently, disappeared, or died, but the recording hasn’t moved. It waits. And when someone listens again, the past and present occupy the same room.

That is where Remy Ireland finds herself in Every Recording Has a Ghost. She begins by investigating recordings. Eventually, she realizes the recordings are investigating her past too. The novel contains mystery, cold cases, an abandoned institutional history, manipulated audio, hidden surveillance, phone anxiety, trauma, memory, and voices that seem impossible to explain. But beneath all of that is something much more ordinary. The human need to understand what happened to us. And the fear that once we finally know the truth, we may never be able to put it back where we found it. Because sometimes a ghost isn’t a dead person. Sometimes it is a memory that finally found its voice.

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

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

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.

Of Laughter & Heartbreak book trailer

This is the summer of locked doors, fragile rituals, and the ghosts that keep count.

I’m Stevie Matthews—almost sixteen, the kind of girl people whisper about. “Bat-shit crazy,” they say. Maybe they’re right. This summer, the order cracks. Obsessive thoughts tighten like barbed wire, rituals multiply, and the only way forward is a hospital stay I never asked for.

Behind those doors, I meet strangers who feel both broken and familiar, each carrying their own secret galaxies of fear and hope. Together, we make a kind of map—messy, jagged, stitched with laughter, unraveling with heartbreak.

This is the story of how I learn that friendship can be born from accident, that healing isn’t neat or pretty, and that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.

This book is a tender, unflinching portrait of adolescence, OCD, and the fragile alchemy of survival—equal parts bruised and luminous, like a diary written in ink and ghost light.

Angela Ellen Grey anxiety bipolar disorder book review chronic mental illness coming of age delusions depression grief group therapy hallucinations healing how to write a memoir intrusive thoughts Journaling literary suspense memoir writing tips mental health mental health fiction mental illness mindfulness OCD phone anxiety psychological suspense psychological thriller psychosis psychotherapy PTSD schizophrenia self-harm social anxiety disorder social withdrawal stress reduction suicide support group work writing writing for healing writing for mental health writing suggestions writing therapy YA fiction YA fiction about mental illness YA novel YA novel about mental illness YA romance

Secret Whispers book trailer

Angela Ellen Grey anxiety bipolar disorder book review chronic mental illness coming of age delusions depression grief group therapy hallucinations healing how to write a memoir intrusive thoughts Journaling literary suspense memoir writing tips mental health mental health fiction mental illness mindfulness OCD phone anxiety psychological suspense psychological thriller psychosis psychotherapy PTSD schizophrenia self-harm social anxiety disorder social withdrawal stress reduction suicide support group work writing writing for healing writing for mental health writing suggestions writing therapy YA fiction YA fiction about mental illness YA novel YA novel about mental illness YA romance

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.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

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.

If I was appointed to give a speech to a large number of people, what topic would I choose?

The stigma of mental illness is the topic I’d choose. Because shame from bullying or even a simple lack of understanding of persons with mental illness is very detrimental to the health of those affected as well as our communities. It leaves the person with mental illness doubting themselves and backing off from social interaction to avoid the feeling of hopelessness and end up in isolation.

Instead, the person with mental illness should try to be social as opposed to isolation. Even connecting online, if in-person is not an option, in order to realize that these feelings are not just your own, but others feel them as well.  Don’t allow your mental illness to define you because there is power in language. Don’t allow ignorance to influence how you see yourself. Don’t allow the judgments of others affect you personally; the wrongdoers don’t even know you.

I’d choose to speak about this subject, if I had to, to bring about change. Change to a neutral language instead of condescending euphemisms and offensive language. We’re not victims, invalids, or defective. Those are painful to hear but need to be talked about so those ignorant about mental illnesses know it’s wrong and hurtful. Disability is not an illness and people with disabilities are not patients. We’re successful people that deserve to be referred to in a balanced manner. Our lives are not simply tearjerkers. We are resilient and deserve to be free of stigma.

3 Books About Mental Illness That I Recommend

Living with mental illness, I sometimes get asked which are the really good books to increase compassion and on what it’s truly like to struggle day-to-day. My favorite three are as follows:

madness marya hornbacher

Madness by Marya Hornbacher pulls no punches in giving you a ringside seat into the devastating illness that is bipolar disorder. The most serious form is when psychotic episodes appear which I found similar to schizophrenia. The major plus for this read is that mental distress particularly during her hospitalizations spills from the page so effortlessly.

the center cannot hold elyn saks

I found Elyn Saks’ The Center Cannot Hold after watching the author’s TED talk, which is fascinating and very informative. I have the utmost admiration for the writer who, although clearly affected by the symptoms of her illness, didn’t allow it to define her or stop her from doing what she wanted to do with her life. It’s a truly honest, heart-wrenching account.

kay redfield jamison an unquiet mind

Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is another book about bipolar and not schizophrenia but the turbulence is similar and the fact that she fought meds for so long until she finally succumbed to the realization that they are indeed truly necessary and lifechanging so that sufferers can now fully function with their assistance in our lives. Jamison is a psychologist so she writes the scientific aspects in an easy to understand, charming witty and all too human way.

Relapse

angiegrey

One surefire way to go into relapse is not taking medications. Why or how would that occur? Degree of insight into the illness, disorganized thinking (forgetfulness of a complex meds regimen), prescription costs, negative side effects, or stigma towards taking anti-psychotics. For the longest time I thought that I was in control of my problem and that nothing really was wrong: I wrote the symptoms off as other things (PTSD or anxiety). Then I took meds for another more acceptable problem (depression). I shouldn’t have hidden my symptoms for so long; but I was afraid.

What are other possible reasons for a possible relapse? Susceptibility to stressful interpersonal conflicts, adherence to the complex meds schedule, or discouragement are but a few. My family knows to watch for the signs of relapse: withdrawal from social situations, changes in sleep patterns or eating habits, staying focused, controlling behavior, being obsessive or compulsive, fear of common things or places, strange or risky behaviors, feeling targeted, or definitely seeing or hearing things that aren’t there.

It is difficult enough with all the possibilities of relapse; but the one we shouldn’t have to worry about is stigma. Myths and misperceptions are preventable.People with schizophrenia aren’t serial killers or don’t have split personalities. Shame, humiliation, and/or isolation need not be another things that people with schizophrenia need to cope with in addition to all the other reasons for relapse.