In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the five-factor model of personality. These factors are often referred to as the Big Five. Personality traits are characteristics that are stable across time and across contexts. The five-factor model includes five personality trait dimensions. These are: […]
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Decolonizing Wellness by dietitian Dalia Kinsey aims to help QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) folks reject diet culture and restrictive ideas about bodies and food in order to achieve greater self-love and self-acceptance. The author, who identifies as a genderqueer, pansexual person of colour, wrote this book to fill a gap in
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This post came about as a result of going down a rabbit hole after looking up whether “the crack of ass” was actually a variation of saying “the ass crack of dawn“, or whether I was just making that up in my head. Ass is a very versatile word, and it’s become particularly popular in
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I was reading a post a while back on Life In Unreality about how we need to talk more about psychosis, so I decided to chime in. In this post, I’ll talk about psychosis in general as well as my own experiences. The basics We’ll start with some basics. Psychosis is a group of symptoms,
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we’re going to look at logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are reasoning errors that people make quite commonly when making arguments. While such fallacies don’t necessarily mean that the conclusion is wrong, they’re a weak link in the argument, and
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Healing by Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), explores what’s wrong with the mental health care system and why there are so often poor outcomes for people with mental illness. While he characterized the current system as broken, he expressed hope that there are ways to fix it,
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Benzodiazepines, or benzos, are a class of medications that act as central nervous system depressants. They’re used for a variety of different purposes, but in the context of psychiatric treatment, they sometimes end up being used in managing mental illnesses that they aren’t actually indicated for. In some cases, over-reliance on benzos can mean that
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is belief perseverance. Belief perseverance is the tendency to hold onto beliefs even after the information that they’re based on is shown to be false. I’m a big fan of this line from a paper by Savion (2009):
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Super Simple CBT by Matthew McKay, Martha Davis, and Patrick Fanning provides a quick and easy introduction to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). While it addresses depression and anxiety, it’s not diagnosis-specific; rather, it provides strategies that are useful for dealing with difficult thoughts and emotions in general. The book consists of six chapters, one devoted
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Investing in mental health care and workplace mental health programs takes money, and in the short term, that can be an obvious deterrent. However, it can really pay off in the longer term. A number of organizations have each put together solid economic cases for investment in mental health, and this post will take a
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