Diagnostic Error: With a Pulse

By S. Melynn

Diagnostic Error: With a Pulse is a poetry collection about survival that outlasts meaning.
Written in fragments, observations, and clinical aftermaths, these poems explore what happens when identity is shaped by control, misread by others, and repeatedly redefined by systems meant to help. The voice is restrained, precise, and unromantic-concerned less with recovery than with what remains after coping becomes a permanent state.

This book moves through conditioning, emotional regulation mistaken for strength, social misinterpretation, dissociation, and clinical harm, before descending into quiet emptiness. There are no redemption arcs here. No inspirational conclusions. Only the steady documentation of a life that learned how to function without being fully present.
These poems are not confessional in the traditional sense. They are records. Case notes written from the inside. Evidence of a nervous system that adapted when it had no other choice.

Diagnostic Error: With a Pulse is for readers who have lived between labels, who have been praised for resilience they never chose, and who recognize that being alive and being well are not the same thing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GH89BR5G
• ISBN13: 9798244159226
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.0"