Blogs
You'll never know what you're truly capable of until you take risks and push yourself. This applies to everyone -- with or without a mental illness.
Learned helplessness is a psychological concept I’ve been familiar with for a while, but had never, until recently, thought to apply it to anxiety. It is most commonly framed in terms of depression, but as I’ve given it more thought, the concept can very easily be carried over to anxiety and may provide insight as to why it can be so difficult to pick yourself up when things get really bad.
Medication noncompliance in bipolar disorder is generally considered a bad thing -- and it generally is -- but can medication noncompliance ever be a good thing? I would say so, in very limited situations. Read on to see why medication noncompliance in bipolar disorder can occasionally be a good thing.
Assertive communication works well when it comes to my communication styles. I have a history of vacillating between aggressiveness and passivity in relationships. Both of these styles come with their downsides and it's been an arduous journey to find an effective middle ground. Assertive communication is my middle ground.
A quick nap during the day can change your life. Adding a nap into your life may seem impossible unless you’re in primary school, but the results are worth finding a way to make it happen. Read on for three benefits of a short nap.
My name is Rosie Cappuccino and I’m a writer, an artist, and the new "More than Borderline" blogger here at HealthyPlace. When I was first diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) five years ago, I felt isolated, frightened and confused about what this diagnosis meant for me. When I read up about the condition in books and online, I discovered that BPD is one of the most deeply stigmatized mental health conditions. It felt awful to be misunderstood and stereotyped as manipulative, attention-seeking and untreatable.
Imagine weakening panic attacks and anxiety attacks simply by being nice to yourself, also known as practicing self-compassion. Both panic attacks and anxiety attacks are intense experiences of severe anxiety that effectively paralyze people, trapping them in severe physical, emotional, and cognitive discomfort. These whole-being strikes are disruptive to life and painful to experience. While often severe, meeting panic attacks and anxiety attacks with self-compassion weakens them and lessens their negative effects.
On most days, I am an individual without debilitating depression. But every now and then, there comes a time when depression completely takes over my body and mind. My arms ache and feel limp and my mind fixates on nothing but suicide. That is when I know I am officially too depressed to work and taking a mental health day seems like the best option.
What is the crab mentality? When you have a bunch of live crabs in a bucket, you can notice something quite interesting. As a crab tries to escape out of the bucket, the other crabs will try to drag it back down into the bucket. This unique behavior of crabs has since been used as a metaphor for how many people behave when noticing the success of others. If someone else has made some great achievement or is making progress in some area of their life, there can sometimes be a tendency to diminish that person or their success. This is known as the crab mentality. And it may actually be a sign of low self-esteem.
My cat helps me through tough times. I’ve talked about my cat, Lemmy, on and off on this blog since it began. I’ve even devoted an earlier post to him. But he’s never really been featured front and center on video before, and I wanted to change that.
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.