A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
A while back, a post about choosing to be positive came up in my WP Reader feed. The blogger mentioned that "our mind is something we do and can have control over." While they weren't making reference to mental illness at all, I don't think control over one's own mind is quite so cut and… Continue reading How Much Control Do You Have Over Your Mind?
I Will Not Be My Mental Illness: Let's Recover Together by Karina Pommainville-Odell, a fellow blogger, is an invitation for the reader to join the author in working on a better life with mental illness. The book's tone is friendly and encouraging, and positive in a realistic rather than over the top way. Chapters are… Continue reading Book Review: I Will Not Be My Mental Illness
It seems like everyone’s talking about gaslighting these days. But if everyone and their dog seems to be gaslighting (or being gaslit by) everyone else and their cat (or if cat and dog are both accusing the other of gaslighting them), is it really a meaningful descriptor of emotional abuse? Or does the meaning just… Continue reading Is the Term Gaslighting Overused?
Probably many of us living with mental illness have wondered at some point where the heck it came from. Nature? Nurture? A hodgepodge of both? Heredity, i.e. what we get from our genes, often seems to play at least some role, but genes aren't the only game in town. This post looks at what some… Continue reading The Role of Heredity in Mental Illness
You may or may not do regular maintenance tinkering with your blog, but have you ever done a major refresh? It's certainly not something you have to do or even consider doing, but it can be a way to liven things up a bit. A basic reason to give things an overhaul would be if… Continue reading Have You Ever Done a Major Blog Refresh?
Here's what happened in my life over the past week: It's not been a very good week for sleeping, which makes for extra space cadet-ness. Normally when I wake up, making the bed is fairly easy because don't flop around too much. This week, it's looked like I've been having a wrestling match with my… Continue reading Weekend Wrap-Up
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is Internal Family Systems therapy. Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is a type of psychotherapeutic approach that's based on the idea that the mind is naturally multiple, and we all have a system of parts. It's often used… Continue reading What Is… Internal Family Systems Therapy
These pics are from my second big international trip. It was 2003, and we hit up 7 countries in 5 weeks. It was fast, but we were very organized and efficient. These pics are photos of prints from film. This was in Györ in Hungary. We were staying in student residences that were also available… Continue reading Travel Pics from Central & Eastern Europe
In Braving Bipolar: A Family Journey and Guide, Stephanie Schlosser shares her experiences with bipolar disorder in order to support others who have the disorder, provide education and insights for those who don't, and challenge stigma. The book is broken into two parts. Part I gives a chronological view of how the author's illness developed… Continue reading Book Review: Braving Bipolar
This post is a follow-up to a conversation Winter Dragonflies and I were having about different mental errors that can feed into social anxiety. We all have a natural set of cognitive biases that can result in mental errors, so I wanted to take a look at what some of those might be. Cognitive biases… Continue reading Cognitive Biases that Can Feed into Social Anxiety