The “Pause” Button

Do you know the feeling of desperate urgency in a conversation with a close friend or romantic partner? The sense that you have to defend yourself from attack, or make a very important point? This feeling is often a signal that it is a good time to use the “pause” button in the conversation. The “pause” button is a previously worked out …

Stigma and Psychiatry

I ran across an article written by a columnist for the New York Times a couple of days ago about what the columnist felt was psychiatry’s “overreaching” (saying that some people who are bereaved may also have a major depression). The article made reference to Michel Foucault’s view that psychiatry is essentially all about making moral judgments on behalf of …

Give Love

We really liked the recent post from Just One Thing on the practice of “giving love.” It resonated with research on how helping others (altruism) improves your mood, and also on the data that shows that one of the most effective antidotes for depression is to systematically try to act more in line with your deepest values. The post is …

Valentine’s Day Gift

I have been thinking a lot about Valentine’s Day, how it can become such a burden if one is single, or bereaved, and trying to figure out a way out of that bind. For years I did not lake the day at all, so I can certainly empathize. I came up with kind of an odd idea, and put together …

Website Problems

One of our very alert readers noticed that the links to Amazon that should allow you to buy books are not working. I tried in a short period of time to fix the problem but it looks as though this is a project that is going to take a few hours, and I don’t see it happening until February 18th …

Idea Map Redux

I just wanted to call your attention to a redo of the site map which we have located on a page called “idea map” to indicate that we have tried to organize the keywords into something that will be useful for finding the topic you are interested in. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the grand idea that I …

Mood and Food

Today’s post was inspired by Disorderly Chickadee’s blog. She has been in an unstable (irritable) mood but her post is about how proud she is of the fact that she has been losing weight. For some reason, several people we have been working with have also been feeling irritable and agitated, and using some of that energy to lose weight…It …

Update for February

Well last night was a lesson in how much time you can spend on the computer without accomplishing very much! Spent the entire night trying to figure out a better way of making a map of the topics in the posts. The result (which doesn’t work yet) is on the page entitled “Map of Ideas”… it is a Mind Map …

Tripolar Disorder

For a long time I have been trying to figure out how to convey to the people I work with the view of mental health professionals that a certain type of depression is really a kind of mania, called “mixed mania.” From an “objective” standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. A mixed state generates lots of energy and agitation. …

Be Helpful

We love today’s post from Just One Thing! (And yes, we have had several references to this site in the last few days… but he is starting the year by reviewing the best ideas on his site). And we felt compelled to put this post up today when we checked our email and found that today’s blog post from the …

10% of Americans Suffered Childhood Sexual Abuse

Approximately 10 percent of American adults were sexually abused as children, according to a study reported in Comprehensive Psychiatry. They are more at risk of psychopathology and suicide attempts than are adults who were not sexually abused as children. This study fits with other evidence. The global prevalence of child sexual abuse has been estimated at 19.7% for females and 7.9% for males, based …

Silver Linings

We have heard interesting rumors about the new movie “Silver Linings Playbook” that is supposed to address some of the issues involved in living with moods in a way that avoids stigma. Last week we got this from the American Psychiatric Association News – “It has been a long time since a Hollywood movie actually seemed like it could help people suffering …

Feeling Already Full

A wonderful friend sent us a note that this post had been very helpful to him. It is, once again, from the Just One Thing site. The practice is called “Feel already full” and it is a perfectly timed reminder that so much of what we see in life (TV especially) is specifically designed to make us feel unhappy with …

Changes

Sometimes you take a very long and arduous journey and end up right back where you started, only with a new appreciation for what you left behind. This is the story of our forum… After spending many hours working with a developer to come up with a new forum for this site, and then, discovering that installing the new forum …

Getting It Done Anyway

From time to time I am inspired to pass on portions of a post from a favorite blog. Today’s Moodscope blog was all about those days when you feel a bit “blah” and what you can do to not get trapped in indecisiveness and time wasting. As it happened this arrived on a day when I was struggling to get …

Coming Out Can Help Your Health

We saw this article and thought it probably has a lot to say about the reasons to be direct with others about moods, and how they affect you. It is from Psychiatric News, January 29, 2013. The same reductions in stress hormone levels have been shown in a number of studies about disclosing potentially stigmatizing conditions. For more on the …

Crisis – When to Consider Hospitalization

A delightful, funny, smart young man we know called us on Friday to say that he had stopped his medications a few weeks ago, and now he felt he was entering a mania. We did our best over the weekend to patch things up, got him more medications, talked to him every day, worked with him to make sure that …

Sleep and Memory

An interesting story published in the New York Times suggests that the reason we are less able to remember things as we get older is that we sleep less well. The article is based on a report posted online on Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The report suggests that as the brain ages, changes take place that interfere with sleep quality, which …

Take a Chance

If you are feeling depressed or anxious, today’s post from Rick Hanson (part of his Just One Thing blog) may be helpful. If you are already feeling energized, you might not need more encouragement to do something risky/taking a chance… Rick’s post is about how, as children, we learn to avoid certain types of conversations that seem too risky, and …