It's time for another week of Working On Us, a series of mental health prompts from Beckie at Beckie's Mental Mess. Please see her post for more details. Prompt #1 – Questions: How do you deal with the Stigma surrounding your mental disorder/illness? The stigma that I've experienced has come in spurts rather than … Continue reading Working on us – mental health prompt
While there is debate over the roles of biological susceptibility and psychosocial factors in triggering the onset of mental illness, it's also worth giving some thought to how the illness experience is shaped by social factors vs. biologically-based symptoms. Once we are ill, we experience symptoms that are influenced by neurophysiological processes, regardless of whether … Continue reading Can the social and biological aspects of mental illness be separated?
As a nurse in my province (British Columbia, Canada), if I am hospitalized for mental illness then the provincial Health Professions Act requires the hospital to report me to the nursing regulatory college, and the college must treat this as a complaint about my fitness to practice. This ends up with being offering the non-choice … Continue reading Doing My Bit in the Fight Against Stigma
There are certainly some good things about social media, but it also provides an opportunity for stupidity to get much greater exposure than it deserves. Some people would likely have a platform to reach large numbers of people even if it weren't for social media. But the average science-naïve person who thinks that snow in … Continue reading Should ignorance be ignored or challenged?
Your Mental Health and You is written by Sandy Pace, whose blog I've followed for some time. He has a degree in psychology, lives with ADHD, and has experienced addiction. The book covers various areas of your life and your thinking where you could make changes to promote better mental health. It's immediately clear how passionate … Continue reading Book Review: Your Mental Health and You
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. As a quick explanation, psychosis refers to a cluster of symptoms … Continue reading Why psychosis scares people
I first heard of the book Written Off: Mental Health Stigma and the Loss of Human Potential by Philip T. Yanos on a blog post by Don't Stigmatize Me. It immediately went on my list of books to read, but it's taken a while to get around to it, and I ended up getting a … Continue reading Book review: Written Off
Harm reduction is most often used in reference to addictions. The idea is to accept that the user is continuing to use because that is what's currently most able to meet their needs, and then identify ways in which they can do so that minimizes associated harms. Harm reduction is a widely accepted public health … Continue reading Applying harm reduction to self-harm
The emerging blogger series is a way to give mental health bloggers who are early in their blogging evolution the opportunity to have their work seen by a wider audience. It's also a way to introduce you as a reader to some new bloggers you may not have discovered yet. This week, we have Nathan … Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: Nathan
Language matters when it comes to talking about suicide, particularly when in it's mentioned in the media. Sometimes, though, I wonder if getting too nitpicky about language is counterproductive. After all, as stigma researcher Patrick Corrigan says, stigma gets attached to labels but is not a product of those labels. On Twitter I recently came … Continue reading How picky should we be about suicide-related language?
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 Alienation and brutality
It's another week in Revenge of Eve's So You Know (S.Y.K.). The focus for this week is mental health stigma. This week's questions are: Do you struggle with your mental health (ie. diagnosed)? What is the most aggravating misconception as it relates to your diagnosis? Is there a family history of mental illness within your … Continue reading So you know… (S.Y.K.)
I mentioned in yesterday's post that a few days ago my family doctor had sent me into hospital because of worsening shortness of breath. It seemed like the ER doc took one look at my list of psych meds and decided to write me off as a psych patient. He barely listened to anything I … Continue reading Adventures in stigma in the ER
Here's what happened in my life over the past week: The difficulty breathing that started last week has just gotten worse. Since further testing wasn't going to be available any time soon in the community, my doctor decided to send me in to emergency. The waiting room was horrible - way over-stimulating. Unfortunately, it only … Continue reading Weekend wrap-up
Today is Bell Let's Talk Day, an anti-stigma mental health awareness campaign sponsored by the Canadian telecom company Bell. Similar to the UK organization Time to Change's Time To Talk Day coming up on February 7, the goal is to get people talking about mental health and mental illness. A couple of weeks ago I … Continue reading #BellLetsTalk – What if the elephant in the room could speak?
