About Sasha Kildare

Between the ages of 18 and 26, author Sasha Kildare’s summers became drugs, sex, psychosis, and psych wards. During manic episodes, she ended up in handcuffs and was raped several times. The integrative treatment she received at Bellevue Hospital, her seventh hospitalization, broke that cycle.

Knowledge, insight, and spirituality allowed her to overcome buried childhood trauma, an eating disorder, and drug addiction so that she could experience, motherhood, fulfilling careers, and long-term remission from bipolar depression. Her memoir/information guide, Intact: Untangle the Web of Bipolar Depression, Addiction, and Trauma, depicts this journey.

A NAMI In Our Own Voice speaker since 2013, Sasha currently works as a high school teacher and has been contributing humor pieces and feature articles to mental health lifestyle magazines bp Magazine and Esperanza since 2010. DrivenToTellStories.com is her website.

Topic Covered by Sasha

Connect to Your Spirit: Untangle the Web of Depression, Trauma, and Addiction

Trauma can rewire the brain and influence addiction and mental health.

Don’t let inadequate nutrition, past trauma, and more jeopardize your recovery or mental health. Learn how to respond to subtle signals from your brain, subconscious mind, and spirit in order to:

• Recognize and fight the pain of mild depression before it triggers relapse.
• Accommodate circadian rhythms prone to imbalance to help avoid mania, depression, or relapse.
• Develop healthy ways of dealing with stress.

Through changing your habits and examining your thought patterns, your brain can create beneficial new neural pathways and you can better connect to your spirit.

• Circadian rhythm, the “body’s clock,” is the 24-hour cycle the of physical, mental, and behavior changes. “Abnormal circadian rhythms may be linked to obesity, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, seasonal affective disorder, and sleep disorders such as insomnia.”
• Neuroplasticity, neural networks in the brain can change through growth, learning, and reorganization, means that the brain can rewire itself in order to function in a new way.
• Trauma-informed care addresses patient’s life experiences, because experiencing traumatic events, especially as children, can have long-term adverse effects.

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