The blog index provides an overview of some of the posts that are part of major recurring themes on Mental Health @ Home, to serve as an easy starting point to explore the site.
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 posts from 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 for info and discussions about all things blogging
Explore MH@H
Resource Pages
The resource pages go into depth on some of the major areas of focus on MH@H and contain a variety of info, tools, and other resources.
Posts By Diagnosis
Here you can find posts tagged in each of these conditions. Some posts are by guest emerging bloggers.
- Anxiety disorders, emetophobia
- Bipolar disorder
- Conversion disorder
- Depersonalization/derealization disorder
- Dissociative identity disorder
- Eating disorders
- Kleptomania
- OCD
- Oppositional defiant disorder
- Pornography addiction
- Personality disorders: antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic
- Premenstrual dysphoric disorder
- PTSD
- Schizoaffective disorder
- Schizophrenia
The official book pages for Managing the Depression Puzzle, Psych Meds Made Simple, and Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis, have lots of info and links to related posts on depression, psych meds, and psychiatric diagnosis.
Popular tags on MH@H
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Find posts by category
Conceptualizing Chronic Mental Illness
The ways in which we conceptualize our illnesses influences how we relate to them. The following posts discuss this issue:
- Getting spoonie with it:
- Rainbow Model of Mental Illness Functioning: a way of conceptualizing the complexity of mental illness symptoms and functional domains
- Is “Chemical Imbalance” a Useful Simplification of Mental Illness?: Depression and other mental illnesses are often described as a chemical imbalance, but that’s not really accurate. Is it still useful as a simplification?
- A psychiatric view:
Negativity & Toxic Positivity
Mental illness can be really hard, and expecting that we should just “choose happiness” is ludicrous.
- Book review: Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich
- 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 just don’t
- Pessimism vs. realism: is negativity pessimistic if it’s actually realistic?
- Positive psychology: is it a good fit for mental illness?
- “Should” you avoid negative people?
- The “toxic person” label
- You don’t need to be positive: other emotions are just as valid
Recovery
What is mental illness recovery?
- Is Mental Illness Recovery a Choice?
- The Moving Target of Recovery
- Finding Recovery in Spite of Mental Illness
- What Is… Recovery?
- What Would Recovery Look Like?
Ways of framing recovery and wellness
- Action for Happiness: More Than Just “Choose Happiness”
- Mental Illness Treatment vs. Wellness Promotion
- What We Can Learn from the Medicine Wheel
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Wellness-promoting activities:
- Contemplative Practices
- Music: how it affects brain and mood
- Painting as a Mindfulness Activity
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.
The therapy mini-ebook collection is also available from the MH@H Store.
The COVID-19/Mental Health Coping Toolkit has links to a broad range of sites that offer free therapy-based workbooks and worksheets.
- Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)
- Hypnotherapy
- Psychotherapy alphabet soup: an overview of several types of therapy
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)
- Behavioural experiments
- 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
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
- Book review: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook
- Emotion myths
- Wise mind in dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) represents the overlap between rational mind and emotion mind.
Psychoanalysis/Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
I have a strong educational background in science and utilizing research, combined with a finely tuned BS-detector. Debunking pseudoscience and public health misinformation makes my mind do a happy dance, and I like to write about it!
How to Spot Pseudoscience talks more about how to fine-tune your BS radar. The main idea, though, is to use critical thinking. Don’t accept things just because they’re put in front of you.
- Starting with a belief, and then working back from there, with an “it exists until you can prove it doesn’t”, unlike a scientific “until you prove it, it doesn’t exist” approach
- Broad statements about what something does, but no scientifically sound mechanism is described
- Explanations based on quantum physics coming from people with no physics background
- Energies and energy flows are described without any actual evidence of their existence
Media & Research Literacy and Critical Thinking
- Can you believe statistics?: We’re presented with statistics all the time, but often more information is needed to actually evaluate what they mean
- Conspiracy Theory Psychology – a great resource on this topic is The Conspiracy Theory Handbook
- How Do You Search for Information?: tips on using Google and Wikipedia
- Separating Reality from Fake Health News: There’s a lot of wrong information floating around about the COVID-19 pandemic, so how can you spot it?
- The importance of we don’t know we don’t know
- Understanding the implications of research design: there are many different types of research studies, and they don’t all produce the same kinds of results
- What Political Polls Mean – And What They Don’t
- Why research literacy matters in mental health: a basic understanding of research makes it easier to separate the science from the BS
Law of Attraction
- Law of attraction: There’s something to be said for the idea that believing something positive will help you to act in ways that increase the chances that something positive will end up coming your way. Except the law of attraction says don’t act, just vibrate out to the universe.
- Speaking of which, do thoughts vibrate? The law of attraction relies on pseudoscience to yes, but actual science says nope, not a chance.
