A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week's term is melancholic depression, also known as depression with melancholic features. The word melancholia comes from the Greek for black bile, part of the ancient four humours medical belief system. In the 5th century BCE, Hippocrates first identified melancholia as… Continue reading What is… Melancholic Depression
Relationship OCD by Sheva Rajaee is written from the perspective of a therapist who herself has dealt with relationship OCD (ROCD). What a perfect combination! I love that more and more mental health professionals are willing to talk about their own mental health challenges. Throughout the book, the author emphasizes the importance of learning to… Continue reading Book Review: Relationship OCD
Safe, Wanted, and Loved by Patrick Dylan is a memoir about the author's wife's experiences of mental illness, how that affected the family, and the difficult journey in the direction of recovery. The book's powerful opening line is the author's wife, Mia, saying "Pat, I am going to prison." At that point, she was first… Continue reading Book Review: Safe, Wanted, and Loved
Complex Borderline Personality Disorder by Daniel J. Fox is aimed at people who have borderline personality disorder along with a co-occurring mental disorder. It describes how these combinations can present and how to manage them. The co-occurring conditions that it addresses are bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis, ADHD, and PTSD/complex PTSD. The author refers to BPD… Continue reading Book Review: Complex Borderline Personality Disorder
Depression is never fun, but depression and the holidays is a particularly un-fun combination. Christmas was a very positive thing for most of my life. It was always a low-stress affair, and food was a very big part of it. Plus I always liked Christmas trees. The last time I actually celebrated Christmas would have… Continue reading Depression and the Holidays: A Blue Christmas
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, so I wanted to explore that and some of the other benefits that research has shown. Peer support can happen in a lot of different… Continue reading The Benefits of Peer Support for Mental Illness
Some of the posts I’ve written lately, as well as people’s comments on response, have got me thinking about the different ways that different people may use the same words. When it comes to mental health conditions, there are technical medical/psychiatric/psychological definitions of terms, but those aren't necessarily the definitions that people are using in… Continue reading How We Talk About Mental Illness: Definitions vs. Connotations
A lot of us in the mental health blogging world are already engaged in advocacy in terms of raising awareness, providing information, and supporting others living with mental illness. There's another kind of advocacy, though, that many of us (including myself) don't typically engage in, which is political advocacy. Quorum.us says "Political advocacy is an… Continue reading Political Advocacy to Challenge Mental Illness Stigma
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… Continue reading Failed/Successful Suicide: Do Words Matter? What’s the Real Failure?
How many times a day do find yourself thinking that you should do this or you should do that? Does saying no to shoulds feel like an option? What would it be like if you were to try saying no? Society has all kinds of expectations for us. Some we hear directly from others (e.g.… Continue reading The Power of Saying No to Shoulds