Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is double depression, which comes at the suggestion of Meg of Where Good Advice Happens. This post uses a lot of abbreviations, which are summarized down at the bottom of this post. The term double depression is sometimes… Continue reading What Is… Double Depression
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is oppositional defiant disorder. Oppositional defiant disorder in the DSM-5 Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is typically diagnosed by the early elementary school years. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), diagnosis requires at least six… Continue reading What Is… Oppositional Defiant Disorder
Getting a mental illness diagnosis can be hard, but getting the wrong diagnosis or going undiagnosed can be even harder. Here are a few excerpts from my soon to be published book Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis on the subject of being misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. “It was frustrating, but my issues over the years haven't… Continue reading What It’s Like to Go Undiagnosed or Misdiagnosed
I'm currently working on my next book, Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis. In it I'm peeling apart the diagnostic criteria for multiple different diagnoses to give a clearer, more reader-friendly picture of what each illness actually looks like. Since the DSM criteria can never fully capture what it's like to experience a given illness, I… Continue reading Mental health bloggers needed!
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week's term is ultra rapid cycling in bipolar disorder. Rapid cycling and the DSM-5 Rapid cycling describes the frequency of switching between mania/hypomania and depression in bipolar disorder. The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders… Continue reading What Is… Ultra Rapid Cycling
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week, we'll look at the difference between a personality trait and disorder. Personality traits Wikipedia defines personality traits as "habitual patterns of behaviour, thought, and emotion" that are mostly stable across time and context. Some traits fall on a continuum,… Continue reading What Is… a Personality Trait vs. Disorder
While some sources of trauma are time-limited, other occur repeatedly over prolonged periods of time. The term complex PTSD is used to capture the profound psychological harm these people exposed to the latter have experienced, including changes in self-concept, problems with emotional regulation, distorted perceptions of the perpetrator, and impaired relationships with others. Diagnostic systems… Continue reading Why isn’t Complex PTSD in the DSM-5?
Mental illness stigma comes from many places and in many forms. Stigma often invalidates the experience of those of us with mental illness. One way this can happen is by pathologizing normal experience. By this, I mean inflating the significance of "normal" emotions and minimizing the significance of mental illness to make it seems as… Continue reading Stigma and Pathologizing Normal Human Experience
