52 Small Changes for the Mind by Brett Blumenthal lays out a year-long series of weekly small changes to improve your overall mental wellbeing. It’s not specifically geared towards people dealing with mental illness, but there are plenty of common sense, realistic ideas that could be useful for anyone. Each of the book’s 52 chapters […]
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We’re all familiar, at least to some extent, with the sex trade. If nothing else, you may have seen the movie Pretty Woman. The level of desperation in the survival sex trade, though, is galaxies away from what you see in Pretty Woman. The vulnerable I used to work at a community mental health team
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is enmeshment. Enmeshment was first described by family therapist Salvador Minuchin. It occurs when there is an extreme lack of boundaries, which prevents healthy differentiation into autonomous individuals. It occurs most often in families, although it can happen in
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Depression is a mental illness that very often has physical effects. There are several potential ways in which depression affects movement, and this post will explore low energy, psychomotor retardation, and leaden paralysis. These symptoms can occur in both bipolar and unipolar depression. Low Energy Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms of depression.
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He’s a Porn Addict… Now What?: An Expert and a Former Addict Answer Your Questions by Tony Overbay and Joshua Shea is written to serve as a resource for partners of men with pornography addictions. It’s a unique combination of viewpoints; Tony is a licensed marriage and family therapist, and Josh is a former porn
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If you’ve read my blog before, you’ve probably noticed that I’m pretty pro-medication when it comes to mental illness. I thought it would be worthwhile, though, to give a little bit more nuanced perspective. My take on meds comes from my professional training as a pharmacist and then nurse, years of experience, and many hours of
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The Jackass Whisperer by Scott and Alison Stratten is a lighthearted look at how to deal with the many forms of jackass you’ll encounter – including yourself. And these encounters are inevitable; “When you put a lot of humans into one space, Jackasses happen. It’s just science.” The book caught my eye because Brené Brown
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One of my major pet peeves is pseudoscience, which Google defines as “a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.” There’s a lot of pseudoscience out there in the world that can spread easily and quickly via the internet, and it often astonishes me what people will believe. There’s
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In this emerging blogger post, Noose Girl of Breathing With a Noose writes about an ambulance joy ride in the context of bipolar mania. Entrance and intake processing is finally complete. Before the doctor moves me from the emergency room to the next phase of my visit, he bestows the knowledge that I may have bipolar
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’re looking at repression vs. suppression. Suppression and repression are examples of Freudian defense mechanisms. They serve the purpose of removing unwanted information from conscious awareness. Suppression involves consciously pushing distressing thoughts, emotions, or memories or unacceptable urges or
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