“I was trying to be brave. I was trying to let people in. I was trying. I am who I am today because of my messes. Because I’ve survived them. Because I’ve written about them. Because I’ve learned from them, because I keep searching for new tools to clean them up, because I keep trying to heal.”

(Don’t) Call Me Crazy is a collection of essays and stories discussing mental illness, from the perception of it to personal stories of living with it. It dives into many aspects of this tough topic, from how individuals perceive it to how society does, to the definition of mental illness and how it differs for each person. It works to start/continue the conversation on mental health.

(Don’t) Call Me Crazy is an extremely personal set of essays and the experience of reading will therefore differ drastically for each person. Some will see themselves in these stories, some will disagree entirely with others, and some even might be entirely disaffected. I still don’t know the extent of this collection’s impact on me, as it’s something I am still actively thinking on/exploring, but I will admit it was an extremely hard read for me and I put off continuing it at several stages.

Mental health, even with its prevalence in modern media today, is still something surrounded with layers of stigma. This collection tackles that using pure honesty and openness, starting the conversation by showing that many authors we look up to and admire struggle with the same things we do. It validates readers by showing that illnesses should not have to manifest physically in order to be taken seriously. It also shows that dealing with mental illness and society’s reactions is not easy and that it’s okay to ask for help.

It’s a hard collection to critique, because on the grading scale of standard collections and anthologies it would score fairly moderately. There’s a lot of repetition in the stories, some feel way too long and others way too short, and it often feels like the categories that the stories are assigned to are meaningless. However, there is a positive side to almost all of these downsides to the people who are reading it. Repetition is often very important, the more you see yourself in media and published stories the more your feelings feel validated. Imperfections in stories breath the honesty of those same stories, as hiding these discussions behind a facade of perfection would feel faked. It puts me in a weird position, writing this review, because I don’t know how to rate it at all.

In the end, I settled on four stars, because I feel this collection can be important for many of the reasons listed above. However, even so, this wasn’t a perfect collection, as few ever are. It had flaws, and I will be honest that there are some stories I ended up skimming or skipping altogether. But the majority of this collection was powerful and wonderful and I definitely recommend it if you're looking either to find validation in others like you, learn more about a subject you may not know more about, or simply to support the authors putting themselves out there in these stories.