If you need a change, start your brain over. Start over your day. Your emotional responses. Your year. Your goals. Approach an old problem or new opportunity in a freshly reset brain. A fresh brain is a calm brain, waiting to be filled up with new ideas, feelings and solutions. There is no limit to […]
I got better with medicine and therapy. Coping skills were there and played an enormous part, but I don’t think I could have done it without professional help. In fact, psychiatric medication has saved my life on many occasions: many. But what do I say to my readers who don’t have access to medical care? […]
There are real, concrete things you can do to manage your anxiety. It’s not all about “thinking positive” or anything as simplistic as that. Anxiety is a physiological response to a stimulus. Since the stimulus we have right now is fear of the plague, we as a world are being presented with anxiety from which […]
Therapy offers you the ability to change your thoughts and feelings. Any problem you have can be addressed with a therapist. And though not all problems can be solved through therapy, many emotional and cognitive problems related to life issues can be dramatically improved, whether you’re mentally ill or not. Over time, you build a […]
With these skills, you can soothe yourself during an anxiety attack, a depressive episode, or an emotional crisis. When I have a situation that causes me pain, the first thing I want to do is figure out what I can do about it. After I assess my situation, I can look at my options and […]
Your psychosis ends. Hospitalizations end. Your episodes end. No matter how far away you go, you always come back. It will hurt like hell and you’ll see only one way out. Hold on. Don’t let it win. Stay stubborn enough to not let it win. The hospital is where you go to start getting better. […]
All I Have To Do Is Feel; Day Two of the Aftermath He’s gone. He was my biggest and most important metric for success, meaning that without him, I’m unmoored. I’m writing lists of values and priorities and goals now that my life is wide open, which is terrifying, exciting, and promising. But “be […]
It started with a hot piece of glass. I’d sucked hot flame through the empty, broken glass bowl of a waterpipe I use to smoke hemp flower until it was hotter than it had been since its creation, and I slowly and confidently pressed it into the soft, sensitive, hairless skin of my inner forearm. […]
Sitting in my wheelchair on the Intensive Care Patient Unit at the DePaul Psychiatric facility, I wept loudly and openly at the sight before me. “How am I back here?!” It wasn’t a question. I lost all sense of whatever decorum and dignity I had left, as I was under the watchful eye of no […]
It was 3 AM, and my heart was racing. I was searching the internet for medical conditions that would account for the horrible abdominal pain I’d been in for the previous 4 months. I had gone to the doctor three times and gotten three different diagnoses and treatments (including a full-body CAT-scan) and was nowhere […]
