As families grow larger and loved ones move away, traditions help to bind family members together and strengthen ties. A ritual or family tradition can be the one constant among an ever-evolving group of related people. Creating new traditions as old ones become stale or have lost their relevance is also a good idea, especially for families with young kids, blended-marriage families, and multi-cultural families.

or, why I should've gone to Hawaii The amount of time I spend watching films that feature Colin Firth and/or Sandra Bullock to offset the moodiness and irritability ignited by the festive season - whilst paying for wholly unnecessary items on my Ebay account. The pressure to invest in one day of no-regrets, wholehearted good cheer and joy. It doesn't come naturally to those of us who spend most of the year dealing with the symptoms of anxiety and depression.I love Christmas. I just don't buy into the myth that it's the one perfect day of the year.

During visualization exercises, the mind can't tell the difference between a real performance and one that is imagined. Neither can the body. Most important, when you visualize yourself, you see yourself in the present, As if you would see it through your own eyes, not watching through the eyes of a spectator.

People with BPD are the pit bulls of the mental health community. We have a bad reputation that, while true in some cases, is usually not grounded in reality.

Near the bottom of the HealthyPlace homepage there's an audio widget, bordered in orange with the header Share Your Mental Health Experience. If you have a spare three minutes, please play the clip titled "I Hear A Voice in My Head" and listen to one woman poignantly illustrate why I write about Dissociative Identity Disorder. This woman, like so many others, is struggling in isolation with something she doesn't understand. "People act like it's nothing," she says. No matter the condition, there will always be people who act like it's nothing. Talking about mental illness, publicly and honestly, is the only way I know to ease that kind of invalidation.

A Respite From My Bipolar Child Bob has been at his father's house since Friday evening for the first half of his winter school break. He won't be home until next Sunday--meaning nine days of life without Bob for us. Of course, I miss him--but truthfully, it couldn't have come at a better time.

I’m spending this Christmas back in the town where I grew up, sleeping in my mother’s guest room. I have to be there a week. A week with parents and siblings. A week of turkey and tiny oranges. A week of me silently begging to go home. But I understand that holiday obligations are, well, obligatory, so I do have some methods for trying to survive it.

If you're like me, identifying all the ways your partner contributes to your relationship problems is easy to do. Pointing fingers isn't difficult when they're aimed at someone else. But Dr. Steven Stosny says mending a broken relationship requires compassion, not blame.

When I first sought eating disorders treatment more than two years ago, I was certain I was going to come out of the two-week hospital stay completely free of anorexia. Several of the nurses told me that I would be successful at recovery because I only had had anorexia for about one year and therefore the disease hadn't yet become an integral part of my personality — yet. I walked out of the hospital fully believing all this, but I soon became engulfed in a fog of anorexic thoughts and behaviors within weeks of being discharged.

...and it costs lives I just read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald which says that, "THE loss of life deemed attributable to depression has been cut by half in new government statistics after a change to the counting method which a leading expert says forms part of a systematic effort to downplay the mental illness toll." (bold added) Nice that they can just magically make unpleasant facts go away like that, isn't it? If only the realities of mental health were that simple.