Blogs
Sarah Sharp
Keeping a child mentally healthy can be challenging, especially if your child has a mental illness as mine does. In fact, I think it can be harder than keeping a child physically healthy since keeping the body in shape basically involves a checklist. Good diet, check. Lots of exercise, check. Plenty of water, check. Annual checkup, check. A child's mental health, though, can be a bit more complicated.
Rizza Bermio-Gonzalez
Struggling with anxiety means often experiencing symptoms unexpectedly, so compartmentalizing anxiety can help. Life does not stop when you experience anxiety. The day goes on, you still have to go to work, go to school, tend to your family, and all of this does not stop when you feel anxious.
Juliana Sabatello
When we aren't at our best emotionally, it can help on a nervous system level to just have someone be with us. I have always responded strongly to the emotions of others, so this also means I respond very well to a calm person comforting me. I work mostly with children, so I am used to hearing the term co-regulation as it relates to parents and caregivers helping children calm down when they are upset, but it can be just as powerful for adults in relationships.
Kelly Epperson
When you're going through postpartum depression, it can feel like you're lost. It's as if you're seeking mental health through an endless maze of treatment, setbacks, and obstacles. Knowing how to treat your postpartum depression is a big step. When it comes to treatment, I firmly believe in using everything at your disposal. I am all for talk therapy and medication. In fact, I used both of those avenues in my treatment. However, that doesn't mean those are the only two ways you can treat postpartum depression. I found that there were several natural methods that helped me feel better and have more good days.
Cheryl Wozny
Suicide is a very real and prevalent issue for individuals of any age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status. It can be more widespread in some locations or groups, but anyone can fall victim to suicidal thoughts, including individuals who suffer from verbal abuse.
Mahevash Shaikh
Picture this: you are at a social event and having a reasonably good time. Then, someone you don't know walks up to you, and after some small talk, asks you, " So what do you do for a living?" If you like your job or don't care much about it, this question can be mildly irritating. But since you are used to it, you answer and move on to another topic. However, no matter how common this question is, nothing changes the fact that it is inappropriate to ask people what they do.
Mary-Elizabeth Schurrer
Around this time last year, I was in serious need of a social media detox because doom-scrolling on Facebook and Instagram had monopolized most of my free time and sabotaged my mental health. But since this made me feel even worse, I knew a healthier solution was in order. That's when I chose to unplug from the vitriol entirely—and it worked. Now, I can confirm that a social media detox helps my eating disorder recovery. So for anyone out there who wants to do their own social media detox, here's what I have learned.
Annabelle Clawson
Setting boundaries is one of the most important and meaningful mental health practices. When you establish boundaries, you can thrive without burning out. You'll draw a safe space where you can become the best version of yourself. And when you're the best version of yourself, you can give more to those around you. So, even though they're your personal boundaries, they benefit others, too.
Nicola Spendlove
In my job as a pediatric occupational therapist, I spend a lot of time focusing on parent education. I find that building a parental understanding of a child's condition is the single most important factor in improving that child's quality of life. I'm beginning to learn that the same is true in mental illness – the level of understanding and compassion that family (or other relevant supporters) have for a person's mental illness has a huge bearing on their experience.
Laura A. Barton
I'll start off by saying that I don't believe suicide is a selfish act. This opinion comes from living with suicidal ideation since before I even knew there was a term for it. For the sake of this blog post, however, I want to explore the opposite. Is suicide selfish? So what if it is? (Note: This post contains a content warning.)
It's when this system is put into motion; the action of life, where our symptom or behavior changes. However, this is who we are; how we are. It's unacceptable only because it's compared to those people without a degenerative brain disease. Then, if you ask me; these are all just symptoms if it's something you are trying to fix. One would assume that in doing so; that there is something wrong. But how could that be if it is humankind that determines what that is in the first place? Although the alternative is me running around in a manic state until the police catch me, and beat the s*** out of me just before they throw me into a hole I won't come out of for 3 weeks.
And so... We are heavily medicated into a acceptable state. But here the issue becomes the unpredictability combined with a lack of inhibition which in itself is very dangerous. Is it that there is something wrong; or that there is a major risk of unmitigated disaster? This is much more useful than blaming behavior. When our healthcare system blames our behavior; they are really just blaming us. The idea that we caused this to our self; as if we had control. The muddied waters between mental illness and substance abuse. It makes me want to scream! None of that even matters. It's not applicable. These words you have used to describe Bipolar; are wrong.
Hypomanic might as well be the manic state in a brain that still has well functioning frontal lobes. The manic state with all the regular inhibition that a person usually has. The loss of that, and now you are manic. Perhaps it's two pieces here, and with different combinations that produces different effects that are what we describe as from what we have seen exhibited in humans. It is still only a description, and one that is being made with the wrong words. I don't think we should take regular life and use that to invent words to describe abnormal life. We need new words. Nobody cares about that; they just want to sleep at night knowing that I won't be lurking outside their house with a shovel.
You are being crazy. You are being insane! A great fear of what we don't understand. Then I'm here thinking "who am I to say that God was wrong when he made me". Well, you still have to live in society, and they are not going to allow you to live the way you would live if you were left to be who it is that you are. What is it that you have become? This is unacceptable. Be like everyone else! Can't do that. Okay, we'll just give you lithium because we can't figure it out. Only took us 150 years to figure it out. We got there by giving people lithium when we couldn't figure out what was wrong with them. Well, in a few words; what was wrong was that we were not like everybody else.
You were young. You felt elation, excitement, and energy. That does feel euphoric when we are young, but it's only because we have never actually felt euphoria. You felt it even more than most people would; because you are female. If anyone could ever describe it; you would be the one to figure it out. I wouldn't describe it as euphoric though. Heavy medication or narcotics maybe. But even then it's too powerful to be euphoria. True euphoria is way more subtle. It's a fleeting moment. You are sitting back flopped in a chair that you landed in the way you would if God just dropped you there for a second, and you landed in a weird way. A quiet and still; nothingness that you landed in for a moment.
Euphoria feels like 100% comfortable in the world as everything fades away. It's like being hugged by God. It feels so great in such a fleeting way. It feels perfect, but there is nothing to it. It is as if you actually felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, thought nothing, and cared about nothing. If you could stop time from passing; it feels like that. We get trapped in feelings. A lithium stare. The autistic mode brain. Lost. Wandering around looking for something when you were not looking for something. Wandering off and not knowing where we are going when we weren't going anywhere. Standing on one foot trying to feel the planet Earth rotating. Outside in the pitch black night.
Euphoria is not like anything else in this world. It is it's own unique feeling; wholly indescribable. All that is there is; is the feeling itself. You know: like we often tell our self that we wish for only a moment... Maybe that is as close as I could get to describing it. The feeling of a perfect moment of nothingness that is altogether far too comfortable for anyone feeling it not to melt into a puddle of butter on the floor, and at the same time be fine with that result of having turned into tasteless creamy & melted butter. I feel it more often with lithium orotate, but lithium carbonate has the same effect mixed into the regularity of lithium calmness. Not everybody gets that euphoric feeling though.
It's just that clinical depression is so bad. Such a bad feeling. What other choice in feeling is there; when we have only felt more & more horrible for 3 weeks. It's a spring. We bounce back as manic. It's not actually a thing. It's just that feeling normal is just that good when you have felt so bad. It's only natural. I don't mean anything by it. How can we say the manic state is actually a thing; though? Right? It's also indescribable, but I suspect the spring effect is the hypomania; then the amount of actual synapse/neuron damage determines the bulk of the psychosis and manic state itself : verses the still remaining inhibition in the frontal lobes of the person's brain. Still, it's hard to say that it's a actual thing.
It's too rare to be a thing. It's like half of 1% and only half of those people will ever even feel it or realize that there is no limit of mania that one can feel or experience. Depression on the other hand; everybody feels that. We have better words to describe depression. People know that. We understand it. What are we going to use to describe a broad spectrum psychosis? I used to say I would just shoot off to the moon. I stopped thinking about it though. You know: how to describe this situation I was in to other people. Later on I just notice the manic state poking through the heavy medications; time to take more medications. To laugh and enjoy what little mania pokes through; among similar to normal life.
I know that a couple of hundred years ago that people would have built their own utopia around what it is that they were. Perhaps that is how we have all failed each other, and in the great freedom experiment of democracy. You know: in the end it all just boils down to human nature. And we are not of a good or even decent nature. I believe our nature is wild, and out of place now. Somehow a new human nature will be formed, but we have not yet reached that point to which it would have begun to develop. Although I do know that we will eventually find a better solution for many of our problems. We know it's not perfect, but we can always work on improving towards the ideal.
take cars,
Daniel