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 …
Political Advocacy to Challenge Mental Illness Stigma Read More »
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 the Real Failure? Read More »
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. …
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 …
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 …
