Blogs
Kate Beveridge
Living with borderline personality disorder (BPD) is harder in a city. Coping with the disorder is difficult at the best of times, but living in a chaotic city environment makes my symptoms worse. I live in Lima, which is one of the largest cities in the South American continent, and it plays havoc with my BPD.
Juliana Sabatello
An ex-boyfriend once told me I was a liability. My mental health was a risk against his future, and he didn't want his professional friends to know that he dated me. I know I am not the only one here with an experience like this, and I'm sure that you, like me, have plenty of similar stories to tell. In my fragile early twenties, I shamed myself like it was my job. I am not good enough. I am a burden on others. I am not a risk worth taking. These core beliefs grabbed hold of every insult like a magnet, providing a script for my negative self-talk and feeding my shame the evidence it needed to thrive. Of course, healthy relationship patterns are not born out of shame and low self-esteem.
Nicola Spendlove
The partnership between families and mental health professionals is often a key component of adequately supporting a loved one with mental illness. I see this every day in my working life as an occupational therapist – when there’s no buy-in from the family, chances of an intervention being successful are dramatically reduced. When my brother developed chronic anxiety and depression seven years ago, I had to practice what I preach and actively foster a good relationship with his medical team. Here are some points about that experience that I wanted to share.
Meagon Nolasco
My mental health caused me to visit a psychiatric hospital when I was 19 years old. I had never experienced hospitalization for my mental health nor did I have adequate coping skills going in. In addition to my mental health deteriorating, I had just come out as a lesbian. I was searching to find my place in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, etc. (LGBTQIA+) community. I found ways to cope once in the hospital though. Read further to see what helped me cope during this dark time in my mental health past.
Martha Lueck
Mood tracking makes understanding your mood triggers or patterns and talking to mental health professionals easier. If you see a therapist, one of the questions they might ask you is how you would rate your level of anxiety and/or depression. An effective way to rate your moods accurately is to track them every day. To learn about some mood tracking pointers and techniques, continue reading this post.
Brandy Eaklor
I never realized how many mental health benefits of having a dog there were until I couldn't see my dog regularly. Once my ex and I broke up, I moved to an apartment where I couldn't have dogs. Now that I am moving out, I know having my dog is a must for my mental health. In this article, I will go over all of the mental health benefits of having a dog.
Natasha Tracy
Going off bipolar medication is a bad idea -- well, it's almost always a bad idea. I know why people want to do it. I would suggest that pretty much everyone on bipolar disorder medication has wanted to go off of it multiple times during treatment. This is completely normal and almost unavoidable. In spite of this strong desire, though, going off bipolar medication is almost always a bad idea.
Mahevash Shaikh
We are two weeks into 2021, so it's safe to assume that most of us are back at work. But instead of healing you, what if "the holidays" made you realize you want to hibernate until the pandemic is over? In other words, if you're too depressed to work, here are some tips from someone in the same boat as you. I promise you will not find the usual suggestions to meditate, exercise, or journal; I'm sure you've already tried those.
Cheryl Wozny
Have you ever heard the cliche that employees leave bosses, not jobs? In many situations, this is quite true. Especially when the person you report to is verbally abusive in the workplace. Unfortunately, I was the victim of verbal abuse at work on more than one occasion. Thankfully, I was able to pick up the pieces of my shattered ego and leave for a better career path.
Tanya J. Peterson, MS, NCC
Anxiety advice is fairly easy to find. One of the advantages of our modern era is the plethora of information available to us wherever we are and whenever we want it. Self-help books abound, and in them, you can find incredibly useful techniques for managing anxiety. Websites like HealthyPlace are wonderful resources. Videos are great resources for anxiety tips, and social media platforms offer pages, groups, and posts from individuals working their way through anxiety and eager to share success stories to help others. This is very positive, of course, but it can also be daunting, overwhelming, and exhausting. It can be helpful to know how to manage all this information once you have it so you can actively begin reducing your anxiety.
Thank you for the reply!
I do realize that my experience has left damage and that this is totally on me to heal it, I also know that it is not the writer’s responsibility to predict this and that this article has clearly not been written to cause harm. If I could express my thoughts, and I’ll do it in a much better way than before!-
The “selfish” accusation is ignorance that has fuelled the stigma surrounding depression. The stigma is all too easy to internalize, I have unwillingly internalized it myself and it has been very prevalent in general when people talk about depression in the past. However, in this case were my concerns lie is in the way the article has been concluded. With the questions “Has depression made you appear selfish? Did you notice it at the time or only later?” this throws the “you’re not selfish, but suffering” point that the main body of the article is trying to go for into question for me. The whole thing has been undermined by this and it left me and my friends confused, it reads as a microaggression. I of course do not think that this has been intended, I just want to highlight this as a consideration for the future.
From my experience, trying to view my suffering through an “am I being selfish, am I appearing selfish?” perspective has only brought guilt and shame, has stopped me being able to talk about it and delayed me starting to get medical and therapy-based help. The writer has encouraged people to talk about their suffering honestly but what happens when we talk about it and people are just not willing to listen to that topic? Or when people seem willing at first then almost wish they didn’t ask? Most people today, even with the stigma being tackled, are still not willing to listen. Unless you are very lucky to have a strong support system of friends and family, it sounds like the person being described in the article did not have this. Also, the writer has said that “had she told me, I know I would have been much better equipped…”, implying that this person had to use specific wording in order to be understood. I would like to know how this person could have spoken about it in order to be understood at this time by the writer, as I have been in a similar situation as this person myself. I really can relate to this struggle to not only find the right words, I have been interrupted, laughed at, treated with impatience and distain so many times when trying to speak. I have found that I could only get people to listen years later, when I was better- “why didn’t you tell me?!”- I did, they were just not willing to listen.
I at first was not going to comment, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The idea of people potentially internalizing the stigma because of the concluding question, well, it’s concerning at best and at worst- dangerous. Even though the article is stating that “you are not selfish”, when reading the question at the end (and I know that the word “appeared” has been used as opposed to straight up “when have you been selfish”, it still made me to look at my illness as selfish, I felt that old guilt and shame again that I have worked so hard to not feel. As a person who has for one reason or another been unable to talk about my depression effectively, I think it would be great if the concluding question was “when have you been able to effectively talk about your suffering with depression?”. It seems more in-keeping with the main tone of the article. We have to be incredibly careful when it comes to encouraging people to talk about this. I know that I am just one person with this perspective, I did try and do the healthier thing when it comes to opinions on the internet that you might not agree with and ignore, however I cannot keep silent anymore when it comes to addressing this; careless words cost lives. The stigma is everywhere, it’s insidious - we need to practice extreme care when talking about mental health, especially when we encourage people to talk about their past experiences, as more often than not, it’s been treated with a distinct lack of care.