Have you ever felt anxiety in a restaurant? Or avoided going out because you were afraid of having anxiety in a restaurant? You need to do it anyway (Exposure Therapy for Anxiety Disorders, Panic Attacks). This is the only way to get over it! Restaurants, then, become familiar and eventually can feel quite safe.

The impact on siblings of children with ADHD is not often talked about, yet it is an important discussion to have in order to create healthy and functioning families. Studies show that siblings of children with ADHD experience the same disruption, chaos, unpredictability and exhaustion as their parents. At times, they may even feel victimized, unprotected and powerless, particularly when faced with expectations to “take care” of their siblings. A healthy family considers everyone’s needs. Here are some tips for parents to help minimize the effect of their ADHD child on other siblings in the family:

This was a question recently asked of me, “can people with a mental illness, like bipolar disorder, live alone?” The answer to me was obvious – yes! Absolutely. Of course a person, even with a serious mental illness, can live alone. But then I thought about it for a moment and maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe there are some tools that facilitate living on your own.

I have an ulterior motive when writing this blog, rather, I need to vent a bit. I write about the importance of a healthy lifestyle within these blogs: food, diet, exercise, medication compliance, staying away from excess alcohol and even further away from drugs that are not prescribed to us. Far, far, far away, next country far! I mean these things. I practice what I preach. But I have not, as I recall, mentioned cigarettes. Nicotine addiction. The chemicals that live in them. I have not spoken about this because I pretended  that nearly a decade of smoking, now at the age of twenty-six, I had yet to quit. Well, four long days ago I quit. Cold turkey.

So that's what I wish I'd known, and would say to anyone facing their first hospitalization. The hospital is not a punisment. You are a member of the treatment team. Staff will not hurt you.

Those of us who fit the description “mentally ill” face exceptional challenges when it comes to networking, career advancement, and interviewing techniques. Johnny All-American Lunchbucket probably never had to explain away that year in a Turkish prison to a horrified Human Resources executive. And yet, for the likes of us, that is not even an exceptional challenge. The mentally ill – (extra-normally enabled) – job seeker needs to be ready with plausible explanations for suspicious terminations, demotions, and outstanding warrants. Honesty is always the best policy, but, bear in mind that when you are talking about intergalactic chess tournaments played in five-dimensional swimming pools, your interviewer simply isn’t qualified to understand you. There is a fine art to crafting alternate explanations that might conceivably be true and satisfy your HR representative’s need to fill out a form that will never be read, or even touched, by anyone else. It is your responsibility to make yourself easy to hire, and one of the ways you do this is by discussing your past in terms that do not fill prospective employers with dread.

His comment came out of the blue as he readied himself for work. "Some people don't think," he stated calmly. My mind raced to figure out what he was talking about. If I were in a normal relationship, I would have simply asked, "What do you mean, honey?" But I wasn't in a normal relationship. During the few seconds it took me to connect the dots between his statement and what he really meant, he didn't say another word. He gave me the courtesy of remaining silent as my mind raced to find a way to avoid a fight that evening upon his return.

Many things seem to trigger people into panic attacks: a sound, sight, smell, or sensation that reminds someone of a past trauma, anticipation of a perceived fear (such as, knowing you have to sleep alone when your partner is out of town next week), a physical sensation (nausea) or a certain emotion (feeling overwhelmed, guilty, embarrassed).  However, when I talk to people about the details in the moment before the panic attack, what invariably happens between this trigger stimuli and the panic is a fleeting thought -- one that people hardly realize as it crosses their mind. This is the anxiety trigger.

Those who suffer from agoraphobia alone or panic disorder with agoraphobia know too well the debilitating symptoms associated with this anxiety disorder. Agoraphobics live under a constant state of dread as though there is something "fundamentally wrong with the universe and stepping out the door will invite the wrongness in," says our guest, Kelly Brumbelow. Agoraphobia forces sufferers to avoid panic attack triggers related to people, places and things. Over time and without treatment, the triggers can become quite extensive until the agoraphobic's movements are limited to only a few safe places.

I have a friend with bipolar disorder. A nice girl. Fun. Charming. Intelligent. She’s lovely really. We email a lot and sometimes she makes me LOL. But seeing her is very difficult. She has a lot of trouble sticking to any plans we might make. This is because she can never predict her mood. Even if she feels like going out the moment we make the plans, even if it seems like a fun idea then, when the time actually comes she may not feel like leaving the house. I know how she feels. Ideas that seem good on a Wednesday, when they actually arrive on a Friday suddenly seem like the biggest imposition in the world and seem as impossible as lifting a mountain. So how does one make plans if one can never anticipate one’s mood?