It sometimes can be very hard to think of ways of getting out of a lurking depression. A recent email from Moodscope (a site with a mood tracking program that many people find very useful) highlights one very useful strategy: instead of staying stuck in your brain, switch your focus to physical activity. This strategy can be surprisingly effective. If …
Coming Out Bipolar
When and whether to tell people about a mood disorder is a topic of great interest to readers of this blog. Disorderly Chickadee is a very personal, and very well written, blog about living with bipolar. Yesterday’s post was all about coming out about bipolar – in this case it was about telling your boss. We think many of you …
Borderline Emotions
Originally, the label “borderline personality disorder” was applied to patients who were thought to somewhere between patients with neurotic and psychotic disorders in terms of psychopathology. Increasingly, though, this area of research has focused on the heightened emotional reactivity observed in patients carrying this diagnosis, as well as the high rates with which they also meet diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic …
Matt Tierney on Take What You Need
Running out the door at the end of a long day, I paused to talk with Matt Tierney, our resident substance use expert, about the conversations I had yesterday about 12 step programs, their value and the role they play in people’s lives. When I was new to psychiatry, I had a natural antipathy to 12 step. It seemed to embody the notion of rigid …
Meditate!
Rick Hanson has a wonderful blog of practices that will help you achieve excellent mental health. We encourage you to subscribe to his newsletter (Just One Thing). We were inspired to share with you a summary of last week’s email. It is devoted to one of the five most useful practices – meditation. Meditation increases grey matter in a number of …
Chronic Health Condition
A woman who works in the health care field came in for a visit with us today. We’ve been seeing her for about five months. She had a problem with depression and then developed a hypomanic episode. She has continued to have mood cycles for the last several months. It’s now clear that she has developed a bipolar type of …
Mismatched Energy
The wife of one of the people I work with sent me a short note saying that her husband was energized (not quite hypomanic), and she was finding it hard to cope with his constant animation and enthusiasm. It got me thinking about scale and how we constantly change the way we talk based on our audience. I am in …
Of Two Minds
This morning I was thinking about the relationship between your pre-frontal cortex and your limbic system. I know, it’s a little strange to be having these thoughts while out riding a bicycle in the morning… a hazard of the profession I guess. The reason I was thinking about this subject is that people’s moods appear to be affected by both …
Body Work
Several months ago a young attorney who I have been seeing for a couple of years came in and, reluctantly, told me that he and his wife had not had sex for the past year. It took two or three months to get him to consider going for couples counseling. I found a therapist who specialized in working with couples …
Who’s to Blame?
“Is it my fault?” This is one of those questions that seems to easily dominate conversations between people in a romantic relationship who are having trouble getting along. It is also a question that is usually impossible to answer (who decides? what standards do you use?) and quite unhelpful. I was talking with a recently married woman yesterday about her …
Relationship Fear
I have been working with a couple of young women who seem to be unable to move beyond a recently ended relationship with a young man. In both cases, there’s no question that the young man is coming back, and yet their thoughts keep turning back to trying to analyze the failed relationship, wondering what might have gone differently and …
No More New Year’s Resolutions
We’re going to make a strong pitch for you to not have to make any more New Year’s Resolutions. Honestly, why this idea of deciding to make big changes in your life on January 1st has persisted, is one of the mysteries of human mythology. Perhaps it’s because we are such incurable optimists at heart. Or maybe it’s because we …
Exercise and Brain Health
According to the Exercise and Brain Health: Good Points to Remember article in the December 27, 2012 issue of Bipolar Network News, “(…) exercise is extremely important in (…) helping to improve depressed mood, increasing cardiovascular fitness, and maintaining healthy cognition.” It is also suggested that aerobic fitness may increase the size of the hippocampus which in turn decreases risk factors for …
Attachment
For most of us there is nothing more important than the quality of our closest relationships. In sometimes frustrating ways, many of us notice that our close relationships seem to follow familiar patterns. Attachment theory derives from the work of John Bowlby, who observed that separated infants would go to remarkable lengths (crying, clinging, frantically searching) to prevent separation from their …
Forum Update
This is yet another update on our project to improve the discussion forum for the website. After much more work than any of us anticipated, there is a working model for a new forum that will provide a great deal more functionality than our old Bublaa based forum. However, redoing the forum involves making changes to the rest of the …
Coming Out
Coming out– One of the topics that has generated the most interest on this site has to do with whether to tell others about the challenges you have to deal with as the result of moods, especially whether to tell people that you have a diagnosis of a mood disorder. I have written a bit about this topic in a …
Happy Winter Solstice
For those of us in the northern hemisphere this is a day well worth celebrating. Today marks the shortest day of the year. Or, to put it another way, from here until summer every day will be a little bit longer, there will be a little bit more light, and eventually the days will get warmer and we will have …
Mindfulness in the News
A number of people called my attention to the December 15 NY Times The Power of Concentration article written by Maria Konnikova on the topic of mindfulness. As I read it, I noticed certain parallels with my December 8 2-Minute Meditation blog post, mainly that there is recent research that shows that as little as 5 minutes of mindfulness per …
Stranger Danger
I have been avoiding the newspapers for the last couple of days, because I don’t want to get caught up in the frenzy of stories about the Sandy Hook shootings. You may say that this kind of avoidance is exactly what I have written in opposition to in other posts. However, I have a special reason. I have two young …
Mind Body Issues
Health problems fundamentally challenge our sense of self and safety in the world. Those people who are able to maintain equanimity in the face of medical disease and aging are truly admirable. There must be about a million articles about how to accomplish this – so I am not sure that what I have to say adds much to the literature – …