Thank you to all members of our discussion forum who responded to my request for feedback. It was very helpful. By and large people felt that the new version of Bublaa – which we use to host the forum – was working alright (aside from the awkwardness around setting up a Bublaa account and then requesting membership in the MoodSurfing …
Trojan Horse Medications
From time to time we are asked to review the care that people with cycling moods have received, trying to figure out, from a complicated story of medication changes and mood cycles, what to do to get someone out of a period of deep pain and dysfunction. A few years ago I did such a review on a young man …
Kindling
What do small sticks used to start a fire have to do with bipolar moods? Not much… Kindling in the context of this post refers to a phenomenon that is well documented in some people with seizure disorders and which may have relevance to some people with bipolar moods. Bob Post, who was for many years Chief of the Biological …
On the Borderline
I am writing a presentation for the UCSF Bipolar Program on the topic of the relationship between Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder and I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts in a quick post. Borderline personality disorder involves a “pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity” which begins by early adulthood …
Recruiting Summer Intern
MoodSurfing.com is recruiting for a summer intern to help with – * Creating content for this website * Miscellaneous administrative work * Editing and updating content from this site in order to publish the book version of MoodSurfing by the end of this year, or the beginning of next. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in psychology, a …
Compulsions, Addictions and Secrecy
I got an urgent call yesterday from somebody that I’ve been seeing for several years. His fiancee had just left him. They had been having problems for several months, problems mostly rooted in his ambivalence about commitment. She went on his cell phone and found evidence that he had been having flirtatious conversations with seven different woman over the last …
Small Rewards
A young woman who was scheduled to go on a big trek in the Himalayas was not doing the training she needed to in order to have a good experience. She had been depressed for the last few months and this was probably a manifestation of that mood. She told me that she felt she “should be doing much more.” …
Fish Oil Update
Since so many people with bipolar and depression take fish oil we thought we would pass on some information in a summary form from Consumer Labs. The full information is available if you subscribe. Consumer Labs is the only source of reliable information about supplements (the only place that does any testing) and if you take supplements we strongly encourage …
Conversations
I am glad to let you know that I just set up the first of what I hope to be a series of interviews with experts of interest to readers of this blog. I am very much indebted to Dr. Descartes Li for his willingness to be the first participant. Please let me know your thoughts (peter@gatewaypsychiatric.com). I am also …
Creative Tension
I was inspired to write today’s post after watching a video sent out by a colleague as her “Valentine’s Day gift” to a group of mental health professionals interested in women’s issues. The video was from the TED series (strongly recommended) and had to do with the challenge of having a long-term passionate relationship. The author was a delightful, French …
A Protest
So many of us have to deal with things that are not fair – depression, unsupporting spouses, financial reversals, weight gain, etcetera, it can be tempting to launch a protest of some kind against the unfairness. These protest actions don’t have to be obvious at all, but they can have powerful effects, nonetheless. A few women recently told me, “I …
Hot Button Issues in a Relationship
Dealing with a partner with emotional or psychological issues is tricky. We spent some time today trying to figure out an approach that would work for one woman and her partner. This is what we came up with. It may help you if you are navigating in turbulent waters in your relationship. The link will take you to the video …
Myths of Weight Loss
In a recent article published in the the New England Journal of Medicine, David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, wrote a summary of what is definitely known and what is not known about obesity and its treatment. We thought that we would add a summary of this important and controversial …
Season Specific Interventions
One of the challenging things about bipolar moods is the constant process of shifting priorities and directions that is involved in “moodsurfing”. A young man we’ve been working with for a couple of years has a very seasonal pattern to his moods. Most of the time, the focus of our work is trying to help him emerge from a constant …
Needing to be Perfect
The need to be perfect is one of the “dangerous ideas” that can destroy a life. It often comes from the fear of abandonment that all of us have, and which can be easily activated in childhood by a mismatch in personality with one’s parent. A wonderful, smart, attractive, funny, energetic woman talked with us about her experience of this. …
Drug Companies
This blog has mostly not dealt with questions related to medications for treating mood disorders. When we looked around to see what was out there on the Internet, it seemed to us that there was no dearth of information about medications. The problem was finding reliable information about non-medication approaches to living with moods. This morning I met with an …
Mistrust in Action
I was talking to one of my clients, a very bright and wonderful woman, mother of a delightful young girl, and usually one of my favorite people. This visit, however, I began to experience the cycle of mistrust. When she came in I was in a good mood, I smiled and said hello. She looked serious. The last time we …
WorkSurfing
The New York Times recently published an intriguing article entitled “Relax, You Will Be More Effective.” It arrived at just the right time. Preparing for an upcoming vacation had made me particularly hectic. And then, while I was on vacation and writing this post, I got a blog post from MoodScope which was devoted to the importance of taking regular …
Trickster Brain
If you want to figure out if something is true or not, you’re probably better off not going to a psychiatrist. Therapists really have no greater ability to decipher what the truth is than anyone else. On the other hand, if you go to see a decent, “good enough” therapist, with enough experience working with people, he or she might …
What If It Works?
For a number of years after I first got started in psychiatry I wrestled with the dilemma of what to do when someone with severe, disabling depression came in for an evaluation, seemed to be an excellent candidate for treatment with an anti-depressant, but was completely preoccupied with potential adverse effects and focused almost entirely on all of the negative …