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 …
I consider myself a mental health advocate, but what does that actually mean? It probably means different things to different people, but let’s chat about it. What a mental health advocate is Before we get to my definition, here’s what a couple of other sources have to say. “Mental health advocates are heroes — individuals …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is atypical depression. “Atypical features” is a specifier that describes individual depressive episodes. While the name suggests it’s not particularly common, that’s not actually the case. The atypical name comes because of the way it differs from depression …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is enhanced cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT-E. I first heard of CBT-E recently in a post by Burnie of Quash Stigma Not Fat; it was a form of therapy she had done to treat her anorexia nervosa. I …
What Is… CBT-E (Enhanced CBT for Eating Disorders) Read More »
When it comes to expectations, my preference is to aim low and then be happy when I meet or exceed them. I know that approach doesn’t work for everyone, so I wanted to explore when it may or may not work. I think it might help to break the expectation/doing/result process into steps. This process …
Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey last week on mental illness and hygiene. Now it’s time for the results! In order to protect privacy, I’m being somewhat vague in reporting some of the responses. I won’t say exactly how many people responded, but I think it was enough to make the results meaningful. …
How Mental Illness Affects Hygiene: Survey Results Read More »
Words interest me, which I suppose makes sense given that I do a lot of reading and writing. I’m particularly interested in the power that some words have, how we decide how much power to give them, and what informs our choices about what words to use. The idea of language reclamation seems quite appealing …
Anhedonia, which refers to decreased ability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable things, is a core symptom of depression; in fact, you can get a diagnosis of major depressive disorder without depressed mood if you have anhedonia. Anhedonia is a part of the melancholic features specifier for depression, as opposed to atypical features, which involves …
Sometimes, hospitalization for mental illness happens involuntarily and isn’t under our control. Other times, though, an inpatient stay is something we have to ponder and weigh the pros and cons of. So, what are some of the factors to consider in making that decision? This post will look at a few of them. Suicidality There …
Is it Time for a Psych Inpatient Stay? Things to Consider Read More »
Delusions are a type of abnormal thought content that involve false beliefs that are firmly held despite evidence to the contrary. They are idiosyncratic and can’t be accounted for by a person’s culture, religion, or level of education. They’re considered a type of psychotic symptom, which can occur in the context of various illnesses, including …
