I was recently browsing the blog of Pete Earley, the author of the book Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, and I came across a post on a recent Manhattan Institute report criticizing Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think tank, and I’ve previously taken issue with …
No One Cares About Crazy People is Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author Ron Powers’ exploration of his two sons’ journeys with schizophrenia, combined with a sweeping social history of mental health care and attitudes towards those with mental illness. He skillfully interweaves these separate threads, drawing the reader along from the early …
An unfortunate reality of having a mental illness is that it’s fairly likely that inaccurate information will make it into your medical record at some point along the way. That might take the form of a misdiagnosis, inaccurate descriptions of how you were presenting, or inaccurate accounts of things you said. You might only learn …
When There’s Inaccurate Information on Your Psych Medical Record Read More »
The raging mouse infestation on the ward where I was recently hospitalized strikes me as something that wouldn’t be allowed to continue on a non-psychiatric unit, but I’m guessing that stigma stops anyone from paying attention to it happening on a psych ward. This is what I’ve come up with so far to email to …
A Mouse-Infested Psych Ward: Does No One Care About Crazy People? Read More »
Sharing my blog with treatment providers came up for me for the first time recently during my inpatient hospital stay. The fact that I had a blog came up during my first meeting with a psychiatrist in ER, as he’d asked what I do with my time since I’ve been on disability. My psychiatrist here …
Do You Share Your Blog with Mental Health Treatment Providers? Read More »
Healing by Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), explores what’s wrong with the mental health care system and why there are so often poor outcomes for people with mental illness. While he characterized the current system as broken, he expressed hope that there are ways to fix it, …
Investing in mental health care and workplace mental health programs takes money, and in the short term, that can be an obvious deterrent. However, it can really pay off in the longer term. A number of organizations have each put together solid economic cases for investment in mental health, and this post will take a …
Stereotypes are a way that we store knowledge about social categories. When a category is considered by society to be deviant, such as the group of people who are mentally ill, members of that category tend to be viewed as a homogeneous group that is accurately represented by stereotypes. There may be a grain of …
Inaccurate & Damaging Mental Illness Stereotypes Read More »
Self-stigma, which comes from public stigma that’s been internalized, can have a significant negative impact on those of us living with mental illness. Peer support can help to reduce self-stigma, and I wanted to explore that and some of the other benefits that research has shown. Peer support can happen in a lot of different …
I’ve written before about the issues with language policing, but this is probably one of the more controversial areas where I believe that words matter less than people might think. We aren’t “supposed to” talk about successful suicide or failed suicide attempts. Sara of Surviving Sara brought this up recently, and I told her it’s …
Failed/Successful Suicide: Do Words Matter? What’s Really Failed? Read More »
