Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression : NPR.
This is a brilliant effort at nipping the downward spiral in the bud when children are at their most formative, and it is definitely running parallel to what I am trying to work on with my son.
» Continue reading “Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression : NPR”
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’ve spent the time on leave from school, working hard on my project at work (summer is our busy season), spending time with my children and working on trying to declutter my house. I didn’t get all THAT far in the decluttering department, but I have made some important headway and that’s enough for me right now.
» Continue reading “It’s been quite a summer”
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”
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”
“Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives (also known as Finagle’s corollary to Murphy’s Law) is usually rendered:
One variant (known as O’Toole’s Corollary of Finagle’s Law) favored among hackers is a takeoff on the second law of thermodynamics (also known as entropy):
» Continue reading “Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives”
I see a therapist to help me achieve specific goals in my life. I am past the point in therapy where I want to talk about my daddy issues; I don’t need insight into my illness, I have it seeping out of my pores. What I need now are results. I know what’s broken; I am looking for tried and true approaches for achieving a higher level of function. I need to replace old coping mechanisms, or areas of my life where I have no coping mechanisms at all, with ideas and practices that work. I need an action plan!
» Continue reading “Turning Thought into Practice”
