Isolation

How Do You Feel About Your Own Company?

I find it fascinating the range of comfort levels people have with being alone. It’s pretty much guaranteed that we will all need to spend at least some time in our own company, yet there are many, many ways in which people experience this. While I know that for some people alone time is quite …

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What Is... Series (Insights into Psychology)

What Is… Social Isolation

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is social isolation. Social isolation involves an objective removal from social contact and relationships, which may occur voluntarily or involuntarily. The term perceived social isolation is used to include a subjective sense of loneliness. While loneliness and social …

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Why depression makes it hard to be around people - graphic of person standing out in a group

Why Depression Makes it Hard to Be Around People

Mental illness can make it hard to be around people for a few different reasons. One of the common ones is social phobia, but it’s not the only reason. Social phobia, also known as social anxiety disorder, can be a crippling condition that makes it extremely difficult to be around people. It affects around 13% …

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The Emerging blogger series on Mental Health @ Home

If You Suffer from Loneliness, You’re Not Alone (Guest Post)

In this emerging blogger post, Kacha of Food.for.Thoughts, Life and its ways writes about the experience of loneliness. ‘We are born alone and we will die alone’, I have to tell it like it is. It is difficult to bear but a burden shared is half a burden. On the other hand we are in …

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Mental Health @ Home book review: How to Be Miserable

Book Review: How To Be Miserable

How To Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use by psychologist Randy J. Paterson challenges us to make our lives more miserable than they already are. The sneaky bit? He’ll make us realize that we’re already doing a lot of those things inadvertently. The book consists of 40 lessons. These are divided into four cheekily …

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Feeling Like a Stranger in My Own Family

I never would have thought that I would feel like a stranger in my own family. Depression changed everything, though. The present story I spent Christmas with my family this year. It was a small gathering – just my parents, my brother, his fiancee, and me. Except it didn’t feel small; it seemed like there …

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