Blogs
I noticed some time ago that I've been choosing to stay sick because it's the devil I know. I've been dealing with mental health problems for nearly half a decade, but it's only in the last year that I've finally started making real progress toward recovery. This is because I finally admitted to myself that I was choosing to stay sick because it was what I knew how to do. Recovery was going to involve a lot of truth and change that I wasn't prepared to face, so I just didn't.
Stress majorly affects my schizophrenia. Looking back on my history of mental illness, it is clear that stress precipitated each of my psychotic breaks. Despite the ups and downs of my recovery, I see vast improvement from my last hospitalization. One area stands out as a persistent weakness, though: dealing with the effects stress has on my schizophrenia.
Online dissociative identity disorder support groups are all over the Internet. This is good because finding support when you have dissociative identity disorder (DID) can be difficult. Sometimes one-on-one therapy isn't enough, and you want to be able to talk with others who understand what you are going through. Finding local DID groups can be difficult, and oftentimes impossible, leaving many to turn to online groups to find support. But are online DID support groups always the best option?
"Be yourself." "You do you." "Listen to your heart." The messages behind authenticity are beautiful ones: you are the center of your world and you are the only voice that matters. But while such phrases are inspiring, we live in a world that bombards us with beliefs, opinions and general emotional noise. This creates a dilemma that many of us struggle with–how do I think like myself when everyone and everything is trying to tell me how to think?
Most survivors of relationship abuse have probably not heard the term "coercive control," but they've almost certainly experienced it.
Even though March is a hard time of year for my schizoaffective disorder, I am focusing on learning to love myself. Besides, I also tend to benefit from taking on new projects. After all, it is seven years ago this March that I quit smoking. So, this spring, I’m taking on the project of self-compassion. And learning to love myself is proving to be more difficult than I first thought it would be.
My name is Ziba Redif, and I’m the new co-author of "Surviving ED" at HealthyPlace. I’m a writer, researcher and photographer from London, with a background in philosophy and psychology. I’m passionate about unraveling the shame and stigma that envelopes mental illness through sharing my own experiences of disordered eating and my journey towards eating disorder recovery, as well as challenging the many stereotypes about eating disorders embedded in our society.
If you distract yourself from anxiety, are you avoiding it? Are you running and hiding? Avoiding, and running and hiding, unfortunately, intensify anxiety; however, distraction can mute anxiety just enough for you to experience some welcome relief. The aim of distraction is to shift your thoughts from the automatic negative thoughts that are part of anxiety, to slow down your thoughts and the tendency to overthink everything and to release physical tension so you feel less like a tightrope and more like a hammock. These six ideas can start you on a happy path to distract yourself from anxiety.
Many people misunderstand those who self-harm. One of the things that make self-harm an inaccessible subject so prone to misunderstanding and even ridicule is that it is something most people cannot imagine ever wanting to do. The less we understand a behavior, the more tempted we are to look beyond the behavior to the person behind the behavior for an explanation. We assess each person’s background, history, personality, and even physical appearance to probe for similarities, the thinking being that the explanation for the behavior can be found in these similarities.
We need mental health care now. I’m done mincing words and I’m done being polite about this. People are literally dying every day because they aren’t being given the help they need. Every day we wait, every day we don’t act, is another day someone will take his or her own life. And that person's blood will be on our hands for doing nothing.
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.