A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
But Deliver Me From Crazy by Katie R. Dale is a memoir of living with bipolar disorder. You may know Katie from her blog, and she also contributed a story about bipolar I to my book Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis. The book begins when Katie was in high school, when her illness first appears.… Continue reading Book Review: But Deliver Me From Crazy
My Beautiful Psychosis by Emma Goude is a gripping, up close and personal look at what it's actually like to experience psychosis. The author's honesty and complete openness quickly shatter any stereotypes of psychosis being frightening and dangerous. The book begins with the events leading up to the author's first episode of psychosis. When she… Continue reading Book Review: My Beautiful Psychosis
My Colour-Coded Life tells Megan Jackson Hall's story of living with schizoaffective disorder. She writes that she hopes the book will help to destigmatize mental illness. The book is made up of diary-style entries from 2008 to 2018. It offers a fascinating insight into living with active psychosis on a day to day basis, written… Continue reading Book Review: My Colour-Coded Life
This post is by Brittany of BiPolarMania. Photo by Hailey Kean on Unsplash Manic Psychosis Psychosis is a mental disorder characterized by symptoms like delusions and hallucinations that indicate a break from reality. Paranoia is a common symptom of psychosis. When I was entering my final year of University I experienced a manic psychosis which is exactly how it… Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: Brittany (BiPolarMania)
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is shared psychotic disorder, also known as folie à deux. Folie à deux is the more commonly recognized name for what the DSM-5 calls shared psychotic disorder. It's a rare condition that involves shared delusions between two or more… Continue reading What Is… Folie à Deux
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week's term is paranoia. Kind of like anxiety and depression, the word paranoia often gets tossed around fairly loosely in common parlance, but in a psychological/psychiatric sense it has far more significance. Google Dictionary defines paranoia as: A mental condition characterized… Continue reading What Is… Paranoia & Paranoid Delusions
People tend to fear the unknown. Psychosis is arguably the group of symptoms that the average person finds the most frightening when it comes to mental health problems. There is stigma associated with many/most/all mental health conditions, but psychosis kicks it up a notch. What psychosis is As a quick explanation, psychosis refers to a… Continue reading Why Psychosis Scares People
Like any field, psychiatry has its own collection of terminology. Some of it is self-explanatory, but some of it isn't. I believe that knowing the jargon helps to narrow the power gap between health care providers and patients, so I put together this glossary of common psychiatric terms. Alexithymia: an inability to identify and describe… Continue reading A Glossary of Psychiatric Terms