“Bitch, I’m gonna kill you!” he yelled, so loudly that it woke us up in the apartment next door. There were no more words after that. The bangs and crashes spoke for themselves. My husband, Matthew, and I had never heard any fighting from Angela’s (not her real name) apartment before. We called the cops right away. After that, my instinct was to run to her rescue; Matthew’s instinct was to beg me not to follow mine.
Read MoreThe Huffington Post: Why Ben Carson Cannot Be President →
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has made it clear that he could not uphold the oath of office to defend the U.S. Constitution. By claiming that Muslims should be precluded from holding presidential or judicial offices on the basis of practicing their religion, Ben Carson has revealed more than his own personal prejudice and bigotry. He has, in fact, revealed his own personal inability to serve as the President of the United States.
Read MoreHyphen: Fighting Back (Interview by Abigail Licad)
In the last decade, memoirs about personal experience with mental illness have proliferated and evolved as a new genre. While many of these memoirs have been self-published, a chosen few have been baked by major publishing houses and made widely available. However, these are largely written by upper middle-class white women. At press time, Melody Moezzi's Haldol and Hyacinths (Avery, 2014) is the only memoir about surviving bipolar disorder written by a woman of color and released by a major publishing house.
Read MoreMs. Magazine: H&M - Where Pseudo-Sustainability Meets Diversity Porn →
The world’s second largest fashion retailer recently made a deliberate move to attract members of the world’s second largest religion, and people have taken notice.
Read MoreBipolar [bp] Magazine: Bipolar Disorder & Missing Memories: I Did What? →
Once, outside of a Taco Bell, I offered a homeless man my bank account information when all he wanted was a burrito. I only know this because my mother was a witness and happened to mention it to me months later. She assumed I would remember it. I didn’t. In fact, there’s a lot I don’t remember from the land of mania, on account of mania.
Read MoreBuzzfeed: 9 Badass Feminists Of Faith You Should Know (Compilation by Gina Messina-Dysert, Jennifer Zobair, and Amy Levin) →
They have been assaulted, arrested, excommunicated, and condemned for defying male religious authority. They even - gasp - use the words “hymen” and “vagina.” Here are nine badass Jewish, Christian, and Muslim feminists who shatter stereotypes and are scaring the sh!# out of the patriarchy.
Read MoreBookRiot: The Best Books we Read in April (Review by Peter Damien) →
The subtitle of Moezzi’s memoir is “A bipolar life” which tends to suggest what the major focus of the book will be about, and so it was with some surprise when I discovered that “bipolar” had an awful lot less to do with the story than “a life” did. This might sound like a complaint, but it isn’t remotely. Melody Moezzi is an amazing writer, sharp and witty and very funny, describing life as a young Iranian woman raised by her family in the American midwest, balancing those two sides of her world and cultures in a pre- and post-9/11 world. The trickier bit happens when her own brain, which is the thing trying to do all that balancing, is itself off-kilter and goes to pieces as bipolar rears its ugly head.
Read MoreThe Huffington Post: 11 Tips on Getting Your Book Published →
Becoming an author is a bit like becoming an acrobat. Few people know how to go about either; fewer bother to attempt, and fewer still succeed.
Read MoreThe New York Times: A Persian in Therapy →
My people don’t do psychotherapy. We have friends. We have families. We have pharmacies. Paying strangers to listen to our problems isn’t our style.
Read MoreThe Huffington Post: Treat, Don't Traumatize →
Given plans to introduce at least two mental health reform bills in Congress this month, some have high hopes that our leaders will soon deliver meaningful mental health reform. I do not.
Read MoreDBSA: Life Unlimited Stories →
If you met me five years ago, it may well have been on a locked psychiatric ward. I may have told you I was a prophet, or a high-level advisor to Barack Obama, or a goat, or all of the above.
Read MoreLive Through This: Interview with Melody Moezzi (Interview by Dese'Rae L. Stage) →
Melody Moezzi is a 34 year old Iranian-American lawyer, writer, and human rights advocate in Raleigh, NC. She lives with bipolar disorder and attempted suicide when she was 25. She maintains a weekly blog for Bipolar Magazine and has written for the New York Times and CNN, among others. Her memoir, Haldol and Hyacinths, was published in August. It’s an amazing story of bipolarity in culture and mind. Melody was one of the first people to believe in Live Through This and agreed to share her story back when I had nothing but an idea. She ended up being the 50th person I interviewed.
Read MoreATLmuslimah: Muslim Women Changemakers →
"I consider myself 100 percent Iranian and 100 percent American."
Read MoreThe Huffington Post: 5 Tips From Your Sober Holiday Guest →
When people first learn that I don’t drink alcohol, they often request an explanation. Mine is rarely consistent. Sometimes I say I don’t like the taste. Sometimes I say I’m Muslim. Sometimes I say I have a medical condition.
Read MorePerspective Magazine: An Interview with Melody Moezzi (Interview by Kayla Razavi) →
The Huffington Post: When Reader Inspires Author →
To the joy and horror of authors everywhere, it’s never been easier for readers to reach us. And given the value so many publishers now place on platform, celebrity and branding, very few authors can afford to be reclusive. So we do the professionally responsible thing. We make ourselves available to our readers — through websites, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and the list goes on.
Read MoreBookRiot: A Useful List of Books about Depression... (List by Josh Hanagarne) →
And at last, something lively and irreverent.
From the Amazon page: With candor and humor, a manic-depressive Iranian-American Muslim woman chronicles her experiences with both clinical and cultural bipolarity.
As a friend of Melody’s, I can say that this description is insufficient.
She’s even more complicated than that blurb makes it sound like she is, and there’s no way to convey how intelligent she is outside of actually conversing with her. But this book is a great start.
The Boston Globe: Haldol and Hyacinths Review (Review by Kate Tuttle) →
Mental illness is serious business — “bipolar disorder is a legitimate and lethal illness that has nearly killed me on several occasions,” author Melody Moezzi writes. Yet the dominant tone in Moezzi’s memoir of battling the disease, including manic episodes that took her over that “fine line between eccentric exuberance and madness,” is an infectious, freewheeling humor. The whipsmart but whimsical daughter of Iranian immigrant doctors, Moezzi details a series of maladies that befell her even before mania set in: First among them was the cultural dislocation of “enduring the seventh grade as the staggeringly skinny, flat-chested brown girl in Ohio, with a budding unibrow and a faint mustache.”
Read MoreThe Huffington Post: A Better Way to Remember Robin Williams →
While many have speculated that Robin Williams struggled with bipolar disorder, the Oscar-winning actor and comedian who lost his life to suicide on Monday never publicly stated as much. In fact, he outright refuted it in a characteristically quick-witted interview with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross in 2006. In response to being “branded” a manic-depressive after volunteering to be on the cover of an issue ofNewsweek about medication, Mr. Williams said, “‘Um, that’s clinical. I’m not that.’ Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes. Am I manic all the time? No. Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah.”
Read MoreNAMI: Facing a Double Stigma (Interview by Hanem Ali) →
Mental Illness stigma is universal, although it may appear differently across countries, communities and religious groups. The pervasiveness of mental illness stigma is often higher in ethnic minority and religious communities. This is mainly because of the stereotypical views about mental illness in general, the double stigma that these communities already face because of their group affiliation and the cultural tendencies that associate shame with seeking mental health services.
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