Getting a mental illness diagnosis can be hard, but getting the wrong diagnosis or going undiagnosed can be even harder. Unfortunately, that’s something that a lot of people struggling with their mental health end up going through at one point or another. Here are a few excerpts from my book Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis …
What It’s Like to Go Undiagnosed or Misdiagnosed Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week, we’re looking at ultra rapid and ultradian cycling in bipolar disorder. Before we get into that, let’s take it down a notch and consider rapid cycling, which describes the frequency of switching between mania/hypomania and depression in bipolar disorder. …
What Is… Ultra Rapid & Ultradian Cycling in Bipolar Disorder Read More »
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 a 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, …
While some sources of trauma are time-limited, others 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 …
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 human experiences. By this, I mean inflating the significance of “normal” emotions and minimizing the significance of mental illness to make it seems …
Mental Illness Stigma and Pathologizing Normal Experiences Read More »
