Blogs
The stages of grief after a death suddenly became more relevant to me, unfortunately. I was notified that one of my friends on Facebook died at age 24 of what appears to be kidney failure. Combined with the recent All Souls Day service at church, this has made me think about the stages of grieving and recovery after a sudden death. According to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross,1 there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They don't always go in this order, and they don't always happen to everyone. But this is a general road map to grief.
Stigma affects those with psychosis, especially when people believe psychosis and psychopathy are the same conditions despite that the two are very different. It is wrong to stigmatize a person with psychosis in any way for many reasons. It is worse to stigmatize a mentally ill person with psychosis, accusing them of being violent or psychopathic. Psychosis is a condition common in people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder, among other mental illnesses.
Binge eating disorder (BED) can take a toll on your body image. This can happen even when there is virtually no weight gain involved during your time of engaging in BED behaviors. When dealing with binge eating, I was living an active lifestyle so I did not experience a dramatic weight shift but it did make a difference as to how I felt about my body. Even with binge eating disorder our body image is all in our heads, so let’s be gentle with ourselves and remember to love the skin we are in (What is Body Image and How Do We Improve It?).
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) doesn't only affect the trauma survivor, it affects the whole family--including the children (Can Combat PTSD Get Transmitted to Children From Their Parents?). As a parent with PTSD, I think that it's easy to get caught up in what having it feels like for me, and it's easy to forget that it's also affecting those around me, including my husband and my stepson. My husband also has PTSD, so it's fairly easy for him to deal with my PTSD symptoms because he has them too. But before I started this post, I really stopped and thought about how it is for my stepson and other children who have parents with PTSD.
Sometimes, schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder tells us we want to die. It’s a scary feeling, and we often don’t know what to do when such overwhelming feelings intrude (Why People Kill Themselves, Commit Suicide). Should we call a loved one? Should we call 9-1-1? Should we call a suicide hotline? I have often felt this way, but I’m still alive, writing this. I am going to share what I do when I think I want to die by suicide. It is my humble hope that my experience will help you when your schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder tells you that you might want to die.
Self-care is a vital tool in reducing anxiety in general, and self-care becomes even more important when we can’t avoid our anxiety triggers (Triggers Can Make Anxiety and PTSD Flare Up). Anxiety triggers are those things—people, places, situations, or experiences—that increase the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety. Sometimes, avoiding triggers is helpful in managing anxiety; for example, if large groups of people make anxiety worse, it’s possible to manage that by meeting friends one-on-one rather than at a party. Other times, though, such a strategy isn’t possible. In times when you can’t avoid anxiety triggers, practicing self-care is incredibly helpful in dealing with anxiety.
I love good things theoretically, but with depression, I can’t enjoy the good things. Most people don’t get this. Most people can’t conceptualize of this. But even when good (recently great) life events occur, I just don’t feel pleasure (Depression Is Not Sadness). I can’t enjoy the good things when I’m depressed.
Everyone with an eating disorder believes in one, sacred lie. This lie is the superficial reason that the eating disorder started. This lie is the reason that girls and boys, women and men, will turn their lives into a confetti of chaos. This lie is the reason that every moment is rife with obsession or shame and the reason that we torture and destroy our bodies in unhealthy ways. It’s the reason we distance ourselves from our friends and family and isolate in our own personal hell. This is the eating disorder lie that destroys us
Fears keep us from reaching our fullest potential. Yet, if you can learn to befriend your fears, rather than giving in to them, you can feel empowered.
Halloween can be a fun holiday, but Halloween can also spread myths about mental illness. The main ones all have to do with stigma--that we are violent and unpredictable, that hospitalization is traumatic and abusive, and that there is no such thing as recovery. Mental illness is the only medical condition shown for shock value on Halloween--you never see haunted cancer wards, for example. Here are some myths Halloween spreads about mental illness and how to combat them.
I believe she will only be able to rid herself of her demons, and hopefully her BPD as well, when she's ready to confront the abuse of her father. If she can put the blame where it belongs, she may stop projecting that victim/perpetrator cycle on the present men in her life. These demons are a metaphor for the purgatory she has created for herself. That reality has consequences in the real world, but it need not be real in the tangible sense. Exorcising her demons will require the expenditure of real physical energy and probably the destruction of aspects of her personality. If this ever happens, and it's possible but not probable, then these demons will evaporate. They are only as real as one's personality is real. In short, reality is not the question, it's what you make of the things you feel to be real.