Irene O'Neill
West Chicago, Illinois, United States
Artist with a Mental Illness
I’ve been involved with The Awakenings Project since the very beginning, in 1996, when we began planning our first art show. I truly love helping others on their own journeys of recovery, and as a volunteer with Awakenings, my life has been exciting, fruitful, and I’ve been stable—although, we’ve had some incredible publicity on radio, TV and newspapers, that could have easily fed into my “delusions of grandeur,” and it truly is grand. We’ve been able to achieve things I never even dreamed of.