Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Dr. Randolph M. Nesse digs into the science of evolutionary psychiatry to understand why mental illness persists, He explains that while the illnesses themselves aren’t evolutionary adaptations, our vulnerabilities to them may have had evolutionary purposes. He takes the rather refreshing approach of acknowledging both the good and the bad …
In this emerging blogger post, Tigerchelle of Borderline and Beyond writes about rejection/abandonment as the most painful borderline personality disorder (BPD) trigger. One of the things that all those suffering with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) deal with a variety of times throughout their life is just how insanel tough it is dealing with this element …
The Worst and Most Painful BPD Trigger (Guest Post) Read More »
Escaping the Emotional Roller Coaster by Dr. Patricia Zurita Ona draws upon acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) techniques to help “super-feelers” work with their emotions more effectively. What is a super-feeler? It’s someone who struggles with emotional regulation, meaning they experience intense emotions and strong emotional reactions. The book focuses on emotional sensitivity; this is …
Book Review: Escaping the Emotional Roller Coaster Read More »
Swinging Sanity is the first book of poetry by N.F. Mirza, who you may know from her blog, Stoner on a Roller Coaster. The book is organized according to five themes, beginning with screaming numbness and ending with random reflections. Each section begins with an illustration depicting different facets of the author along with a …
Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) has a lot of useful concepts, but one of my favourites is wise mind. Wise mind is the area of overlap between our emotional mind and our reasonable/rational/logical mind. Emotional mind deals in feelings, while reasonable mind deals in facts and evidence. Neither emotion mind nor reasonable mind is wrong or invalid, …
I became a nurse in 2004, which was before I became mentally ill. Even then, I wasn’t a fan of using a 1-10 mood rating scale with my patients. It struck me as a bit of a cop-out, and a poor substitute for actually exploring with the person how they were feeling. Adventures in hospital …
Why I Hate the 1 – 10 Mood Rating Scale for Depression Read More »
What exactly are emotions? Well, there’s no easy answer to that; it depends on who you ask and what their theoretical perspective is. But regardless of how we define them, how do we describe them? That can be easier said than done. There’s even a psychiatric term, alexithymia, for difficulty identifying and articulating emotions. Several …
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 …
Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life is written by psychologist Dr. Susan David. I was quite impressed with this book. When I’m reading a book to review, I make notes of the points that stand out for me; with this book, I ended up with several pages of notes, because …
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 »
