Mind – When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate – NYTimes.com.

I wholeheartedly agree. I also think it’s important to protect your children from toxic familial relationships so they learn to model healthy relationships filled with love. I have been estranged from both my parents and my only brother for several years now and it’s not a decision that I regret. I only regret its necessity and harbor some feelings of anger, resentment, and sadness about not having healthy relationships with people who should be in my life but for their inability to respect my right to my own.

» Continue reading “When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate – NYTimes.com”

I feel “off” today. Kind of…flat. Don’t really want to do anything, struggling through work because there are problems causing confusion and delay, and generally kind of feeling tired and ambivalent about everything. Maybe I need a nap; I know going to bed at 4am didn’t improve my situation. It’s harder getting out of a funk when you work from home, I think. I find it harder to pull myself together and focus.

» Continue reading “Have you ever just felt “off?””

I have witnessed first hand the bootstrap conundrum. There is a prevailing attitude in our country that people who have problems need to learn to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, snap out of it, and “just do it.” A typical bipolar response to this attitude, however, is “how do you pick yourself up by your bootstraps when you don’t even have any boots?”

» Continue reading “Part 4: The Bootstrap Conundrum & Personal Accountability”

In ye olde days, doctors used to call it “compliance.” You were prescribed medication and if you took your meds, you were compliant. If, for whatever reason, you did not take your meds, you were labeled “non-compliant” with all the attendant bad juju that went with it. Non-compliant was fairly well synonymous with “difficult” or “untreatable.”

» Continue reading “Part 3: Treatment, Adherence, Crisis, and Stigma”

“Denial is an unconscious defense mechanism used by those faced with a painful reality. It is an automatic reaction in an attempt to reduce anxiety by denying thoughts, feelings, or facts that are consciously intolerable. It is common for those who are diagnosed with a life-long illness to go through periods of denial.”

» Continue reading “Part 2: Denial”

Someone recently related to me that they had received a diagnosis but weren’t sure they accepted it. I have seen this scenario played out in the bipolar community many times: “But I am not psychotic/manic/suicidal” etc. The “problem” with diagnosis, with any kind of labeling or categorization of a person’s personality or identity or deeply ingrained mental characteristics, is that it is an incomplete way to communicate information.

» Continue reading “Part 1: Diagnosis, Misdiagnosis, and Manifestations”

I have been thinking about mental wellness over the past few days, in response to the idea that a patient might not accept a diagnosis and the role diagnosis plays in mental wellness. I’ve also been thinking about the concept of “reframing” that my therapist has me working on, and the concept of mental illness. I wanted to try to reframe the idea of mental illness to approach it from the perspective of mental wellness instead.

» Continue reading “Four Part Series: Diagnosis, Denial, Treatment, and Personal Accountability”

Don’t Neglect Your Body as You Develop Your Mind.

I was talking to my husband late last night about the things that are preying on my mind these days. He leaves for a contract job 1000 miles away from us next week and I am hunkered down trying to ride out the emotional turbulence leading up to his departure: all of the last minute home improvements, the disorganized clutter involved with finding passports, social security cards, etc., the cleaning and packing.

» Continue reading “The Mind-Body Connection”

My husband has a really bad habit of buying something because it’s a good deal, even if it’s not exactly what he wants. He then spends an exorbitant amount of time and money trying to make it into whatever it was he really, truly wanted. The problem with this scenario is that it always ends up costing more than if he’d just bought what he wanted, and leaves him disillusioned and resentful.

» Continue reading “Get What You Want!”

“Optimists live longer, healthier lives than pessimists, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a study that may give pessimists one more reason to grumble.” I told you so!

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5247NO20090305?rpc=59

» Continue reading “Pollyanna and the Road to Immortality”