or, How Not to Mistake Phish Food for Your Self-Esteem You're Not An Idiot Trying Harder Doesn't Always Work There's a lot of talk about positive thinking and its links with self-esteem but little that talks about tone. This made me feel really stupid, when I couldn't seem to think my way out of my mental illness. Tone Matters

Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder can be excruciatingly lonely. I endured my loneliest moments with DID in the first few years after diagnosis. Granted, my primary relationship at the time was drawing its dramatic last breaths and I'd recently lost my job. I had virtually no support system and was barely able to feed myself and my child. There's no doubt my loneliness was the result of more than just my Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis. But when I look back through my diaries from that time period, it's clear the diagnosis was partially to blame. In hindsight, it's easy to see why.

As I mentioned in this week's audio, Bob recently suffered a reaction to one of his psychiatric medications. He’s fine now, but the discussions between his father and I that have followed leave me wondering if he’ll survive the fallout.

...and similar ideas with which I struggle. Sometimes, I struggle. I feel so far away. From everything, especially mental health. Getting up, getting ready to face the world, wondering just how close the edge is, today. It all takes patience. When you're dealing with anxiety and depression, when thoughts will barely stay in your head, let alone make sense, when the fog sets in...It takes patience. Inhuman, incalculable patience. Fighting the good fight sometimes means losing your way

It's with humility and a little embarrassment that I admit to having come to erroneous conclusions about sexual addiction and sex addicts without the data to back me up. Sexual addiction facts should come from educated, experienced experts - not  entertainment media and anecdote. We were very fortunate to have Robert Weiss join us last week on the HealthyPlace Mental Health TV Show.

Work plus the holidays, especially Christmas and New Years Eve, put more stress on you and your mind than any other scheduled times of the year. One of the more common stress-related problems is panic attacks.

The holidays are the perfect time to instill a sense of appreciation in your kids for the blessings they have in life. I was out shopping recently for gifts, and ran into some friends who were having a hard time finding a gift for a particularly spoiled niece. This particular young teenage girl they were grumbling about had all the latest gadgets, $200 jeans, and her own horse. Now what on earth could they get her (that wouldn’t break their wallets) that she didn’t already have?

Rapunzel! Rapunzel! What can the woman in your hair teach us about borderline personality disorder (BPD)? As a villain, Mother Gothel in Disney's Tangled is unique.  She's not motivated by revenge, greed, or lust for power. Gothel, terrified of growing older, is motivated by fear. As a result, she begins to display symptoms of BPD--to the point where she will literally die without Rapunzel and her magic hair.

It's no secret that raising children requires patience, particularly children with mental illness. Patience can be the difference between moving forward from conflict and escalating into a full meltdown. I have, however, discovered a quality even more important to raising a child with a psychiatric condition--compassion.

When we were children, for most of us, Christmas was magical. You got to tear into shiny wrapping paper and discover the most amazing and wondrous gifts inside. There was a Santa Claus who confirmed we had been good all year long. There was a Christmas tree reaching to the sky and cookies and candies abounded. Our four-year-old, six-year-old, eight-year-old minds didn’t see the faults, cracks, bills and squabbles. All we remember is the Barbies, remote-control cars and cookies for Santa. And so it should be. Those memories, even if mostly embellishments of imagination, are great to hold onto. The problem is, for some reason, we spend our entire adult lives trying to recreate the magic that never existed in the first place.