Blogs
Have you ever looked at a mental health self-care tip and thought, That’s not for me? I know I have. Those kinds of tips honestly used to make me feel even worse about myself because, gosh, how broken was I really if these don’t appeal to or work for me?
One of the most challenging parts of being in recovery for Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is dealing with society's normalization of alcohol, a deadly drug. Alcohol is everywhere. Some days, triggering situations come at me more quickly than I can process them. Some days, I want to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, and stay there forever because that feels like the only safe place in this alcohol-obsessed culture.
I remember visiting my therapist when I was learning to cope with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and one of the things he said was, "Mr. Brocklebank, you have set yourself a very high bar." Of course, I knew this already. I have been painstaking and particular about everything I do for as long as I can remember—what some might call a perfectionist.
I’m Hayes Mitchell, and I am excited to join "The Life: LGBT Mental Health" blog. I’m a mental health writer with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in writing with a minor in psychology. I identify as queer and transgender (trans). I began discovering my identity back in high school. Today I’m 22 and still learning about myself every day. I’ve changed my labels many times over the years. I’ve identified as bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and demisexual. I tend to withhold telling people because when I change my mind, I don’t want them to discredit my past experience. Every one of those identities has been real to me at each point in my life. I believe in gender and sexuality as being a spectrum. Everyone exists somewhere on that spectrum.
Living with verbal abuse can drastically alter your life choices and how you navigate the world. However, it's critical that you break away from being the victim if you are recovering from a verbally abusive past. Dealing with abuse is only part of your story and is not the only way to define you as an individual.
I think I’m on a very good medication cocktail. There are several reasons why, but the funniest one is that when I typed “medication cocktail” into my notes on my phone as a story idea, the predictable word “hour” appeared. I was able to see the humor in that, and when I told my husband, Tom, about it, he said, “Medication happy hour!” and we both laughed. Ain’t love grand?
I’m Rachel Craft, and I’m excited to join the "Coping with Depression" blog at HealthyPlace. I was diagnosed with depression over a decade ago in college. As a type-A perfectionist, I was constantly overwhelmed with stress and never got enough sleep. My habitually low self-esteem took a dive at one point, and I developed an eating disorder and started experimenting with self-harm. It was a terrifying period of my life because I realized I might not survive if I didn’t find help.
Hello, my name is Obsessed with Metrics. I say this with snark, but I also genuinely mean it. A few months ago, when I wrote about my exercise addiction, I briefly touched on how metrics fuel this behavior. I count the number of steps I take. I count the number of miles I run. I count the number of stairs I climb. I count the number of minutes I exercise. I count the number of calories I burn. At times, I feel like a human calculator—ironic, since math has never been my strong suit.
After a year of blogging for HealthyPlace, I must now depart. However, a long goodbye isn't really useful for anyone, including me. So this final post is addressed to you -- the undiagnosed reader who suspects they may have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and is looking for guidance on how to proceed.
When you struggle with anxiety, it is sometimes inevitable that you will also cope with depression. The constant worry, the feelings of insecurity, the fears, feeling overwhelmed, and most noticeable for me, the feelings of exhaustion from the anxiety -- all of these things can lead to suddenly feeling down. What has concerned me about this in the past has been that if I feel down and continue to feel this way, the depression may become severe to the point that it is difficult to pull myself out. So I've had to be mindful of taking care of myself in order to avoid anxiety becoming depression.
But it is that horrible, wish i could transfer all the pain i've caused to myself, even if i would die
My parents and I drove down to visit her and when we got there, my daughter told us that her father and his family were physically and emotionally and sexually abusive and that they didn't feed her for weeks on end. Of course we didn't know if it was true or not, so we got a lawyer and I got emergency physical custody of her.
Fast forward two years of her in my custody and she has had some serious behavioral issues- lying, stealing, destruction of property, manipulation, triangulation-pitting one family member against another, self harming, suicidal thoughts, depression and severe anxiety. We've had her in outpatient and inpatient programs multiple times and her behavior is not getting better. A month ago, she claimed that she wanted to kill herself and murder everyone else in the family. In a panic, her teachers and school social worker called the state and had her assessed and put in inpatient again. Now my 70 year old geriatric parents took temporary guardianship of my child and had me thrown out of their house, all because she's saying I was physically and emotionally abusing her. The same story she had about her father, that turned out to be a big fat lie.
My point is my daughter is severely mentally ill and my poor parents believe her lies and I wonder how long it will take for my daughter to turn on them, too.