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 …
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 …
The International Hearing Voices Movement (InterVoice) seeks to normalize, depathologize, and destigmatize the experience voice-hearing, as well as provide support to people who hear voices, see visions, etc. InterVoice is based in the UK. There are also 28 national networks, including the Hearing Voices Network in the UK and Hearing Voices Network USA. The Hearing …
In The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, Esmé Weijun Wang shares how schizoaffective disorder and, in particular, other people’s reactions to it have affected her life. The author was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder while attending Stanford University. It took nine years to get a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis, as doctors seemed reluctant to diagnose a primary psychotic …
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 …
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 …
Alien Boy: The Police Killing of a Man with Schizophrenia Read More »
Here are a few great TED Talks I’ve found on a variety of topics related to mental health and illness. The Voices in My Head (Eleanor Longden) A psychiatrist once told Eleanor Longden that she would be better off having cancer than a psychotic illness, as it would be more curable. Having the voice she …
