In this emerging blogger post, Brittany of BiPolarMania writes about experiencing manic psychosis as part of bipolar disorder. Psychosis is a mental disorder characterized by symptoms like delusions and hallucinations that indicate a break from reality. Paranoia is a common symptom of psychosis. When I was entering my final year of University I experienced a […]
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is malingering. Many of us living with mental illness spend quite a bit of time trying to pass as not mentally ill. However, sometimes when there’s sufficient incentive people will fake mental illness for secondary gain, and this is
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is shared psychotic disorder, also known as folie à deux. Folie à deux is the more commonly recognized name for what the DSM-5 calls shared psychotic disorder. It’s a rare condition that involves shared delusions between two or more
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Bring Me To Light: Embracing my Bipolar and Social Anxiety by Eleanor Segall describes her journey with mental illness, from pre-diagnosis through her work on recovery. It’s written in clear, simple language, making it easy to understand for readers with no background knowledge of mental illness. She begins by talking about her Jewish heritage and
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week’s term is paranoia. Kind of like anxiety and depression, the word paranoia often gets tossed around fairly loosely in common parlance, but in a psychological/psychiatric sense, it has far more significance. Google Dictionary defines paranoia as: “A mental condition characterized
People tend to fear the unknown. Psychosis is arguably the group of symptoms that the average person finds the most frightening when it comes to mental health problems. There is stigma associated with many/most/all mental health conditions, but psychosis kicks it up a notch. What psychosis is As a quick explanation, psychosis refers to a
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Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse is a documentary about a man with schizophrenia who was killed by police in Portland, Oregon. This film was funded by The Mental Health Association of Portland and over 1500 individual supporters, which I thought was pretty impressive. It’s an extremely disturbing example of police brutality against
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I first heard of the documentary Out of Mind, Out of Sight when I saw it recommended on the Bipolar, Uninvited blog. It sounded interesting, so I wanted to check it out. NCRMD It’s shot at an inpatient unit in a forensic psychiatry facility in Brockville, Canada. All of the patients had committed a criminal
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The disturbing documentary God Knows Where I Am tells the story of Linda Bishop, and her death after being released from a state psychiatric hospital. The film includes readings from Linda’s journal, and commentary from people who knew her, including her sister and her daughter. Their words powerfully captured the pain and frustration of a
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Like any field, psychiatry has its own collection of terminology. Some of it is self-explanatory, but some of it isn’t. I believe that knowing the jargon helps to narrow the power gap between health care providers and patients, so I put together this glossary of common psychiatric terms. Alexithymia: an inability to identify and describe
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