"The first step to taking control of your anger is to tell yourself, and keep telling yourself, I'm okay," writes Matsakis. "All that's happening to me is that I'm feeling angry. All I have to do with my nager today is feel it. I can figure out later what to do about it. All I have to do now is ride with it. If I can just feel the anger without hurting myself or someone else, I am a success."

This weekend, Bob turns 10 years old. A momentous occasion, for sure--why haven't I been in the mood to celebrate? Aside from it being tough to get into party-planning a for someone who has acted anything but party-worthy...parties and Bob don't mix.

One of the problems with mental illness is that it is episodic. Particularly in the beginnings of mental illness, someone will have an episode of illness, and then an episode of wellness. While I'm never against episodes of wellness, this does lead to a problem: when we're well, we convince ourselves we don't have a problem and refuse to get help. This is normal human behavior. No one wants to believe there is anything wrong with them. So it's natural to deny problems when they are not readily harming us. Unfortunately, this means that many people don't get help for a mental illness. When we're sick, we're too sick to get help. When we're well, we deny we need it.

I hesitated to use the word war in the title. I considered using the word struggle. But war is defined by combat: You are at war with your mental illness. Sometimes, every day. Struggle means many things, but war feels appropriate. You can win a war, perhaps struggle along the way, but land on your feet nonetheless.

Hi, my name is Jack, and I suffer from depression. I was first diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder about seven years ago, but I’ve been waging war on this brain disease for a long time. And it is a disease. It is not a character flaw. It is not an excuse for my shortcomings. It is not a spiritual defect. It is not a case of the occasional blues. It is real, and it is painful — physically painful. It is maddening and it can be gut wrenching. It is an illness just as diabetes is an illness. I call it a war because war is hell, and so is clinical depression.

The stigma attached to mental illness is powerful because of ignorance.  But is living openly with mental illness in an effort to change the stigma a good idea?  More Than Borderline's Becky Oberg considers this.

Disclosing an anxiety disorder matters, because a lot of people feel they don’t. And you should tell the people that matter to you, the people that form the everyday backbone of your relationships, whether that's in the form of colleagues or more intimate members of family or friendship circles. Tell them because choosing not to takes something away from those relationships, because an anxiety disorder is a significant part of your life and some of the healing comes in accepting that.

Eating disorders can be extremely isolating and lonely. Counting calories or throwing up your food after you eat makes it hard to be around other people. There is the fear that you might eat too much, or that someone will notice that you are just pretending to eat. It takes a lot of energy to hide your eating disorder symptoms, and that makes it easier to stay home and disconnect from your friends. I have been very lucky. My friends know about my struggles with anorexia, and we have stayed close in spite of my attempts to isolate and hide at times. This week I was again reminded how important friends are to me, and how they play a role in helping me stay in recovery.

Sometimes, my frustration at Bob gets the better of me, and I hit him. Or pull his hair, or pinch him, or kick him, or any of a number of physically abusive gestures. Fortunately, he's usually asleep during these attacks--and so am I--because it only happens in my dreams.

Sometimes electronics can fail us. Sometimes the internet goes down. Sometimes the power blacks out. Sometimes your computer hard drive gives up the ghost. And sometimes those nifty calendars we put in the cloud that happily sync with our portable devices & home computers get eaten by server failure. What are we to do?