I got thinking about this a while back when reading a post by MJ about being put in a seclusion room while on a psych ward as a teenager. While seclusion is sometimes necessary for safety, I think serenity-promoting spaces could be more useful, at least in some cases. In my last nursing job, which …
Creating Serenity-Promoting Spaces for Mental Health Read More »
We’re surrounded by awareness campaigns, particularly health awareness campaigns. In the US, the number of designated national health awareness days had reached 200 by 2015 (Purtle & Roman, 2015). In 2017, the Stanford Social Innovation Review published an article titled Stop Raising Awareness Already. Pointing to the great many awareness month designations all for a …
How Effective Are Mental Health Awareness Campaigns? Read More »
Should people with mental illness have access to medical assistance in dying? In Canada, that’s going to happen in the near future, but exactly what it will look like hasn’t been decided yet. This is something I support, but a lot of people don’t, so I thought I’d write about it. A bit of background …
Unfortunately, mental health professionals are a major source of stigma towards people with mental illness. Recovery-oriented practice is one possibility for transforming mental health care into a less stigmatizing place, so let’s talk about what that might look like. What recovery is Personal recovery, also known as psychosocial recovery, is a different can of tuna …
Recovery-Oriented Practice and Mental Illness Stigma Read More »
Manic Man: How to Live Successfully with a Severe Mental Illness by Jason Wegner, with a foreword by Dr. Kerry Barnes, is a memoir of a first episode of bipolar mania and subsequent recovery. The book’s prologue opens with the author’s parents having called paramedics to take him to hospital. It then shifts back in …
Mental illness can involve feeling really crappy and having a lot of difficulty functioning. That’s not the experience of everyone with mental illness all of the time, but it’s there in the mix somewhere. Yet sometimes it seems like people want to avoid the ugly bits, and talk around mental illness rather than talking about …
Is It Helpful to Talk Around Mental Illness Rather than About It? Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week’s term is seasonal affective disorder. Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a subtype of depression or bipolar with symptoms that occur based on a seasonal pattern. It was first described in 1984 as the result of an American study of mostly …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week’s term is functional neurological symptom disorder, formerly known as conversion disorder. Conversion disorder is a type of somatic disorder that involves the conversion of mental illness into neurological-type symptoms, involving sensory and/or motor impairments. In the DSM-5, the name …
Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder (Conversion Disorder) Read More »
The ACT Workbook for Anger by Robyn D. Walser and Manuela O’Connell uses an acceptance and commitment therapy approach to support readers in better managing anger. Anger is framed as a mix of feelings, physiological sensations, thoughts, and actions, and the authors explain that experiencing it is normal; it’s getting hooked on it that can …
Living with a chronic health condition, it can be hard to see patterns in all the different things that are going on. That’s especially true if brain fog gets in the way of being able to remember things. That’s where tracking in a bullet journal (or in an app, or elsewhere) can come in handy. …
Mental Health Bullet Journalling: Habit & Symptom Tracking Read More »
