If you have a mental illness and have a paid job or volunteer gig, chances are that, at some point, you’ll be faced with the question of whether to disclose your mental illness at work, and if so, how much to disclose. Yes, there may be laws in place to keep employers from discriminating against […]
Disclosing Mental Illness at Work: The Good and Bad Read More »
Mental illness is a health issue, not a criminal one, but the police role in mental health crises can end up blurring that line. In some places, people struggling with their mental health are routinely handcuffed to be taken to hospital by police. How is that appropriate? It seems like a practice that accomplishes little
Should People in Mental Health Crisis Be Handcuffed? Read More »
An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison is an intimate look into the havoc that bipolar disorder can wreak. The book captures her journey with bipolar, from its emergence in her late teens to its effects on her accomplished career as a clinical psychologist and university professor. The book contains rich descriptions, and it’s searingly
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week’s terms are shame and guilt. Guilt and shame are sometimes used synonymously, but they’re actually two distinct constructs that focus on different things being bad or wrong. Both are social emotions in that they arise from the way we
What Is… Shame vs. Guilt Read More »
Ketamine is a relatively new option for managing treatment-resistant depression that has a different mechanism of action from other antidepressant medications. Ketamine itself isn’t new, though; it’s a dissociative anaesthetic that’s also known by its club drug name Special K. Over the last 10-15 years, multiple research trials have shown that it has an antidepressant
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week’s term is judgementality. [As a quick spelling geek comment, judgementality is spelled with an e after the g, while judgmental is more commonly spelled without an e.] According to Psychology Today, being judgmental involves getting satisfaction out of making
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In Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things, Jenny Lawson uses “furiously happy” as a weapon to counter mental illness, and intends to “destroy the goddamn universe with my irrational joy and I will spew forth pictures of clumsy kittens and baby puppies adopted by raccoons and MOTHERFUCKING NEWBORN LLAMAS DIPPED IN GLITTER AND THE
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In this post, I’ll take a look at some of the available guidelines for evidence-based treatment of anxiety disorders. While psychotherapies are extremely important in the management of anxiety disorders, this post will focus only on anti-anxiety medications. The treatment guidelines I refer to come from the British Association for Psychopharmacology and the World Federation
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I can’t think of any other type of health condition that has such polarized relationships with medications as mental illness. In some ways, to medicate or not to medicate has become a moral issue, with various involved parties taking a stance based on principle. Often, this stance is very broad, making sweeping generalizations. Public misconceptions
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There are a lot of excellent mental health resources out there, and quite a few of them are actually free. Here are some of the good mental health workbooks and worksheets that I’ve come across, most of which are available as printable PDFs. They’re based on therapeutic approaches that have proven to be effective. This
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