A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
The International Hearing Voices Movement (InterVoice) seeks to normalize, depathologize, and destigmatize the experience voice-hearing, and also 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 movement believes… Continue reading A Look at the Hearing Voices Movement
Over the last three years (wow, has it been that long?), I've read and reviewed a lot of books. Here are a few quotes that stood out for me. No One Cares About Crazy People In No One Cares About Crazy People, Ron Powers intertwines a sweeping history of mental illness stigma with the stories… Continue reading Interesting Book Quotes from Past Reviews
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang gives insights into her life with schizoaffective disorder and some of the major issues she's faced as a result. Want uses the term schizophrenias to refer to primary psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Her initial diagnosis was bipolar disorder, and it took 9 years to… Continue reading Book Review: The Collected Schizophrenias
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… Continue reading What Is… Paranoia
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… Continue reading Why Psychosis Scares People
Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse is a documentary, available on Amazon Prime, 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… Continue reading Alien Boy: The Police Killing of a Man with Schizophrenia
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) https://embed.ted.com/talks/eleanor_longden_the_voices_in_my_head 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… Continue reading TED Talks: Mental Illness
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… Continue reading Book Review: No One Cares About Crazy People
A primer on antipsychotics and how they work