We all have trillions of microbes living in our intestines. This microbiome, which develops in infancy, plays a major role in our digestion, but there’s growing evidence that it affects more than just our digestive system. This collection of critters weighs about 2 kg and includes bacteria, fungi, and viruses. There is no “normal” microbiome […]
Does the Gut Microbiome Affect Mental Health? Read More »
I first heard of the Open Dialogue approach in the book My Beautiful Psychosis by Emma Goude. It’s an alternative way of managing psychosis, and I wanted to explore it further. What Open Dialogue is Open Dialogue was first conceived in the Western Lapland province of Finland in the early 1980s. It emphasizes listening with
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is avoidant personality disorder. Avoidant personality disorder (AVPD) falls within the DSM-5‘s cluster C of anxious/fearful personality disorders. It’s characterized by intense feelings of inadequacy and fear of social rejection, and avoidance is relied upon as a coping
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Red Face by Russell Norris is a memoir of living with social anxiety disorder—with a twist. The red face of the title comes from a condition the author has called idiopathic craniofacial erythema, which produces intense and often unprovoked facial blushing. He also developed erythrophobia, where blushing itself becomes a source of fear. It sounds
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Now is a far better time to be mentally ill than it was a few hundred years ago. Institutions like the infamous Bedlam were not happy places, and you might just find yourself chained to the wall for years on end. In the 1800s, you may have ended up in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is shy bladder syndrome, also known as paruresis. Shy bladder syndrome, or paruresis, involves difficulty urinating in public settings due to fear of perceived scrutiny when others are present or anticipated to be present soon. It actually falls
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Is there a “right” way to talk about illness and disability? The current popular favourite is person-first language. It really got going in the 1990s, with the American Psychological Association leading the charge. Instead of talking about a “disabled person”, person-first language literally puts the person first, as in “person with a disability.” This has
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You Will Never Be Normal by Catherine Klatzker takes the reader on a journey of discovery with her as she learns that she has dissociative identity disorder and Parts inside of her have been holding trauma she hadn’t even been aware that she had experienced. The book opens in 2009 as she’s having a talk
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Reading Our Minds by Daniel Barron, a psychiatrist and pain management fellow, explores the incorporation of Big Data to improve the practice of psychiatry. The idea of supporting psychiatric assessment with solid data is an appealing one, but many questions come to mind. I was surprised by an apparent blind spot of the author’s that
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A fellow blogger wrote a while back about creating your peace, and it got me thinkng about the relationship between non-acceptance and suffering in the context of mental illness. Mental illness isn’t fun, that much is clear. How we relate to illness, wellness, and recovery can evolve over time depending on the individual illness, how
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