Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
Last year I wrote about a police wellness check gone wrong, in which a young woman was dragged half-naked in handcuffs through her building by a police officer, While the woman was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, a story about the matter in the Kelowna Daily Courier used the word "arrested" multiple times, including… Continue reading Homelessness & Addiction: Embracing Stigma in a Third-Rate Newspaper
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is moralization. This topic came to mind recently while reading a post on another blog. The author was making pornography a moral issue, and I wanted to do some exploring around that process of moralizing. The term moralization… Continue reading What Is… Moralization
I saw this CBC story recently about a man who was written off because he was just a psych patient. I wanted to write about it, then promptly forgot about it until suninthespring brought it to my attention. In April 2018, David Pontone went to the emergency department at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, Canada.… Continue reading Just a Psych Patient? – Stigma in the ER
Patrick Corrigan has been my research crush for a number of years now. And what is a research crush, you might ask? I like how his mind works. He's a psychologist and stigma researcher, with lived experience to boot. He's one of the most prolific publishers in academic journals that I've ever come across. His… Continue reading The Problem with Language Policing
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is the euphemism treadmill. Psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill in a 1994 article in the New York Times. It refers to a process by which words that are used as a euphemism for… Continue reading What Is… the Euphemism Treadmill
Recently, I came across a post that was a myths vs. facts type deal on mental illness stigma. One of the myths identified was that people with mental illness are disabled. The blogger's response was that, on some days, mental illness could make it harder to work for some people, but there are also people… Continue reading Is It Helpful to Sanitize Mental Illness?
Lately white privilege has been a hot topic. The people I've come across who take a stance against the idea of white privilege seem to have in common the line of thinking that they haven't been handed anything, so how can they have social privilege? I thought it might be worth reframing social privilege in… Continue reading Another Way of Looking at Social Privilege
I've seen ableism being mentioned on Twitter a number of times lately. Aside from the obvious meaning, I wasn't familiar with in a mental health context. This post will explore what ableism means for people with psychiatric disabilities. Defining ableism An article on the Center for Disability Rights website describes ableism this way: Ableism is… Continue reading Ableism: The Assumptions People Make About Ability (and Disability)
NIMBYism is a fascinating phenomenon. NIMBYs, who think that something is okay as long as it's Not In My BackYard, cover discrimination with a thin veneer of civility and acceptability. Among the many manifestations of this is with regards to social housing, including supported housing for people with mental illness. The NIMBY arguments NIMBYs' arguments… Continue reading NIMBYism and Mental Health Housing
I think we judge. We all judge, meaning we're all judgmental, even if we don't like to admit it. And that's okay—or is it? I generally think of myself as pretty open-minded. I think people should embrace whatever viewpoints they want to embrace, as long as they're not channelling those views into harmful actions against… Continue reading Are You Judgmental?
