This index provides an overview of the posts that appear as part of major recurring theme on MH@H, to hopefully make it easier for you to explore the blog.
The weekly blog schedule is:
- Guest blogs may show up on:
- Mondays & Wednesdays from the Emerging blogger series
- Tuesdays & Thursdays from the Wounded Healers interview series.
- Wednesdays are mental health book reviews
- Fridays are the What is… Insights into Psychology series, which looks deeper into the meaning of a variety of psychology-related terms
- Saturdays are weekend wrap-ups, a look at what’s going on in my world each week
- Sundays are about blogging
Resource pages
Blogging resources
Find posts by topic
Posts by diagnostic group
Here you can find posts tagged in each of these conditions. Some posts are by guest emerging bloggers.
- Anxiety disorders
- Bipolar disorder
- Borderline personality disorder
- Depersonalization/derealization disorder
- Dissociative identity disorder
- Eating disorders
- OCD
- Pornography addiction
- Premenstrual dysphoric disorder
- Schizoaffective disorder
- Schizophrenia
Depression and trauma are covered below.
Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis offers a multi-faceted perspective on the reality of mental illness, combining diagnostic criteria from the DSM-5, commentary based on clinical experience, and first-hand accounts from guest contributors living with various illnesses.
Depression
My latest book, Managing the Depression Puzzle, covers a wide variety of different strategies that might be helpful in managing your own unique depression puzzle. It covers medications, somatic treatments like ECT, psychotherapeutic approaches, mindfulness, self-care, and more.
Given that my own illness is depression, it makes an appearance in many of the posts on MH@H, but these are the posts that are focused primarily on depression and effects.
- Estrogen & depression: effects of female hormonal fluctuations
- Letting go of a life before depression: releasing the life I lived when I was well
- Master of My Domain? Depression and Masturbation: can masturbation actually help with depression? Science says it might.
- Were you always depressed or anxious? Or did it appear later on in life?
- Is depression anger turned inward?: Freud’s belief about depression
- Is there ever only one explanation for a mental illness? Or does saying it’s all one way exclude a set of people?
- Should we be looking for a root cause for depression? Or is it just too complex?
Symptoms of depression
The mix of symptoms can vary over time. Different subtypes of depression have their own typical patterns, including melancholic depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and seasonal affective disorder.
Anhedonia:
- Anhedonia & motivation
- Decreased positive & increased negative affect: depression can involve the loss of positive feelings (as in anhedonia) and/or increased negative feelings
- What depression takes away
Cognitive symptoms:
- Compensating for Depression Brain
- I’m Actually Getting Stupider: The THINC-it Test: THINC-it a research tool that measures common cognitive effects of depression
Decreased energy:
- Spoon theory: a metaphor for the energy requirement of tasks in chronic illness
- When taking a shower is like climbing a mountain
Irritabiliity:
Isolation:
Movement effects:
- How depression affects movement: Energy, psychomotor retardation and leaden paralysis
- Psychomotor retardation (slowing of movement and thoughts), and its possible biological basis.
Non-medication treatments
- Botox: Botox in the frown line area may help with depression
- Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT):
- Somatic treatments for depression: treatments that involve applying energy to the brain, including ECT and TMS
- This one flew over the cuckoo’s next: ECT in real life: my experience getting ECT in hospital
- Supplements that actually work: vitamins don’t cure depression, but there are some supplements that research has shown can be helpful
Negativity & Toxic Positivity
- Positive psychology: is it a good fit for mental illness?
- Happiness is a choice, my ass: it can’t be a choice if mental illness takes it off the menu entirely
- It gets better… or does it?: some things do get better, but some things simply don’t
- Pessimism vs. realism: is negativity pessimistic if it’s actually realistic?
- “Should” you avoid negative people?
- The “toxic person” label
- You don’t need to be positive: other emotions are just as valid
Psychiatric Medications
My book Psych Meds Made Simple has plenty of info about psych meds all in one place. The book and these posts draw on my training and experience as a mental health nurse and former pharmacist. I am pro-medication as an option, but decisions should be made based on an individual weighing of risks and benefits.
More than any other kind of medication, though, we often have complicated relationships with medications. There can be a lot of stigma and a lot of moralizing, but no one else can know better than you do what your mind and body are telling you they need.
The psych meds 101 series is a great place to go for the basics on common types of psychiatric medications:
- Do we know how psych meds work?: some people say psych meds aren’t valid because we don’t know how they work; except that’s not really true
- Naltrexone: an opioid blocker with a variety of uses, including for dissociation
- Pregnancy and medication use
- Psychiatric side effects: Meds that can make you crazy (literally)
- Anxiety disorders and bipolar disorder evidence-based treatment guidelines
- Borderline personality disorder and medications: they can help, but only so much
- Do antidepressants work? – answers from a new meta-analysis
- Ketamine for treatment-resistant depression
- STAR*D study: a large study looking at antidepressant use in real-world conditions
- Suicide risk with antidepressants:
- Treatment resistant depression
Therapy
Besides the posts listed here, I’ve done quite a few book reviews that cover acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), and other therapeutic approaches. A therapy mini-ebook collection is also available from the MH@H Store.
The post mental health workbooks has links to a broad range of sites that offer free therapy-based workbooks and worksheets.
- Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)
- Hypnotherapy
- Psychoanalysis-based therapy
- Psychotherapy alphabet soup: an overview of several types of therapy
Wise mind in dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) represents the overlap between rational mind and emotion mind.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- ACT life compass
- Book review: Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life by Steven Hayes
- Exploring values
- Thoughts as leaves on a stream: a metaphor for de-fusing from thoughts
- Thought suppression
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
- CBT for insomnia and for chronic pain
- Cognitive distortions
- Core beliefs
- Exposure and response prevention (often used for OCD)
- Safety behaviour: you think they make you safer, but they actually just reinforce anxiety
- The should monster and shoulding ourselves to death
Trauma
The Mental Health @ Home Store has a mini e-book PTSD Treatment Options: An Overview.
I’ve reviewed a number of books written by trauma survivors; you can find these in the book reviews directory. In particular, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is an excellent resource.
- Adverse Childhood Experiences study: the ACEs study was pioneering research about the effect of childhood trauma on health in adulthood
- Complex PTSD: Why Isn’t It in the DSM-5?
- Creating a trauma account
- EMDR therapy
- Flashbacks
- Intergenerational trauma
- SKIDS: Traumatized kids and the school system: this documentary shows an alternative school that operates with a trauma-informed model
- The neurobiology of traumatic fight/flight/freeze: looks at the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and the tonic immobility response
- Trauma-informed practice: this approach to mental health care recognizing the enduring impact trauma can have on relating to others
Work, Disability, and Workplace Bullying
I’ve faced negative attitudes at work related to my mental illness, and I’ve also experienced workplace bullying. It’s important to talk about these things since they can be so isolating.
Know what your rights are based on disability laws in your area. Workplace Strategies for Mental Health has some useful information on supportive performance management.
- Adapting ambition: changing career goals as a result of mental illness
- Burnout
- Disclosing mental illness at work: the good, the bad, and the ugly
- Is that my career going down the toilet?: getting closer to being unable to work due to mental illness
- Managing working (or not) with disability
- Mental illness and the dreaded job interview: mental illness can create some significant challenges when approaching a job interview
Workplace bullying
- Making sense of workplace bullying: how I used research literature to aid in understanding my own experience of being bullied
- The effects of bullying on mental health
- The other #metoo: workplace bullying is another form that power imbalances in the workplace can take