Challenging stigma by getting loud about mental illness
Reading Our Minds by Daniel Barron, a psychiatrist and pain management fellow, explores the incorporation of Big Data to improve the practice of psychiatry. The idea of supporting psychiatric assessment with solid data is an appealing one, but many questions come to mind. I was surprised by an apparent blind spot of the author's that… Continue reading Book Review: Reading Our Minds
Winter Dragonflies wrote quite a while back about creating your peace. It made me think about the relationship between non-acceptance and suffering in the context of mental illness, and I started this draft that I've finally gotten around to writing. Mental illness isn't fun, that much is clear. How we relate to illness, wellness, and… Continue reading Non-Acceptance, Suffering, and Mental Illness
Psychology Dr. Marsha Linehan is the creator of dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), which is generally the first-line treatment of choice for borderline personality disorder, a condition which she herself has. It's very skills-based, and many of the skill are more broadly applicable than just for BPD. The focus for this post, though, is some of… Continue reading Wise Words from DBT Creator Marsha Linehan
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay At various points along the way in my 3 1/2 years of blogging, I've wondered if I'll ever run out of things to write about. It hasn't happen yet, and it's not going to happen anytime soon, but I do still occasionally wonder if there is, in fact, a finite well of material… Continue reading Is There a Finite Well of Blogging Material?
Here's what happened in my life over the past week: I've been going back through old posts and creating new graphics, and it's been interesting to see the changes over time. I have a bad memory for that kind of thing, so I tend to assume that how I'm doing now is pretty similar to… Continue reading Weekend Wrap-Up
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we're doing a 2-for-1 looking at schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder. Both schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder fall within the DSM-5's cluster A, which is the odd/eccentric cluster. Despite the similarities in names (it took me a long time… Continue reading What Is… Schizoid & Schizotypal Personality Disorders
English is a strange. Recently I was reading a post by Claudette of Writer of Words, and Angie of King Ben's Grandma had left a comment about how one might use the word combobulated, which presumably exists because you can say someone is discombobulated. I wondered something similar not long ago about disgruntled/gruntled, and apparently,… Continue reading English Can Be a Rather Strange Language
Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones tells us why spite can actually be a good thing, even though it probably doesn't seem like it could be. An act is considered spiteful if it involves harming another person, but in doing so, also harming (or potentially harming) oneself. Spite causes us to… Continue reading Book Review: Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side
I find religion to be quite fascinating, despite the fact that I don't personally believe the fundamentals of any of them. This post will be a bit of a meander through thoughts kicking around in my head related to religion. I would say that I fall somewhere in the vicinity of weak agnostic/soft atheist. By… Continue reading Some Thoughts on My Version of Soft Atheism
I've noticed that a lot of people in the blogging world have quite a strong inner critic. I don't, and II find it fascinating when it seems like people believe that they should self-criticize in order to do things properly, or in order to avoid being a bad person. So let's chat about it. To… Continue reading How Does the Inner Critic Get Started?
