Acclaimed performance artist Bobby Baker talks about her diary drawings, which chart her journey through mental illness and breast cancer, back to health.
‘Unfinished care revolution’ lets disadvantaged groups down
The “unfinished revolution” of care in the community has failed the most disadvantaged people in society, according to a report.
As the government embarks on a wholesale shake-up of care, the report warns that a lack of services in the community means that resources are still directed to hospitals which are “untherapeutic and dangerous places”…
Have you seen any interesting articles or videos or images online pertaining to mental health, psychology, psychiatry or neuroscience that you’d like to open up discussion about here?
Submit here and we can get talking about them!
Just a heads up, because I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately on the topic: I am not a doctor, and even if I was, it would deeply negligent of me to advise about medications via the internet. I’m sorry but I just can’t help in that capacity.
I’ve been in therapy for 4 years and only THIS year did I really start making real progress. It takes time and a LOT of effort. I highly highly recommend it.
I won’t publish your question because I can’t put a trigger warning before it.
What terrifies you about antidepressants? What kind of therapy did you try? Therapy is not an instant fix: it won’t work within 2 sessions… it requires perseverance, which I know is hard, but it sounds like you might have a good support system to help?
Andrew, who runs the wonderful zine ilivesweat (check it out!) gave me a heads up on this interesting and important article about DC Comics’ portrayal of the mentally ill (particularly those with psychotic diagnoses).
The role of the media in encouraging stigmatizing attitudes towards the mentally ill should not be underestimated - especially comics, which have a high readership of adolescents (an age range at which psychotic symptoms most often first present). Media presentations may shape not only the behaviours of the public but also inadvertently the reactions of the disordered themselves: Link et al (1999) suggest that the very act of perceiving the mentally ill as dangerous translates to fact regardless of contrary evidence because “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”, (Thomas & Thomas, 1928).
Greg et al (1994) analysed UK media content during a one month period and found that two thirds of items dealing with mental health issues forged a link to violence. Two fifths of participants believed mental illness to be associated with violence and cited the media as their source. Some even accepted this view against personal evidence. Not only are violent stereotypes a concern, but also moralistic and demonising interpretations of senseless crimes as indicative of a sinful nature (Corrigan & Watson, 2005).
Consistently maligning the mentally ill as deviant, violent, evil, and determined to overthrow or hurt the ‘good guys’ (i.e. the neurotypical) serves to stigmatise and further alienate the mentally ill from mainstream society. It constructs a culture of shame around mental illness. It deters the mentally ill from seeking help. It pushes them into struggling alone. It is offensive. It is unnecessary.
Why can’t the explanatory narrative surrounding ‘bad guys’ in comics be that they are just bad? Why do they have to be mentally ill? Why can’t more of the good guys (like Starman) be mentally ill? (“The way it’s depicted so often with villains is that the guy is bad because of his mental illness. That mental illness completely defines him, and that’s just not how it is in real life.”)
We should remember that the mentally ill are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crimes, and this is no doubt at least partially because media portrayals of them as other, deviant, violent, amoral or evil makes them targets of attacks.
Schizophrenia: 100 years of bad treatment
“Too often, people with severe mental illnesses are fobbed off with drugs alone. There are plenty of other treatments proven to work, but a poll by my organisation, Rethink Mental Illness, found just 16% of people who have schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are getting access to all the treatment recommended by Nice for their diagnosis.”
Hello chaps! My new job as outcome researcher / blogger for a psychology practice affords me the opportunity to come up with some interesting tweets for you all about psychology and therapy. I’m starting on taking the twitter reins today, so click through to follow! Hope to see you there!
“If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life…”
Click through for full text.
“Schizophrenia,” Elyn Saks writes, “rolls in like a fog, becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on.” Saks is a professor of law, psychology and psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, and she’s written widely on mental health and the law. But her knowledge of schizophrenia is deep and personal. Though many of her colleagues and students are just now learning it, Saks herself suffers from the disease. It emerged when she was in college and strengthened in graduate school. She suffered serious episodes of delusions and paranoia, at times mumbling to herself in hallways and forgetting to eat and bathe. Remarkably, despite several hospitalizations, Saks managed to graduate as class valedictorian at Vanderbilt and complete studies at Oxford and Yale law school. She’s told her story in a new memoir. It’s called “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”…
“You know, I had a bunch of symptoms when I was growing up. I think a lot of them were within normal limits. You know, I was fearful. I had some phobias. I had some obsessions. I had some kind of intense fears that, in retrospect, might have been a kind of beginning of the almost poking through, but the first real clear sign of it was when I was 15 or 16, and I was sort of walking home from school precipitously. I left, I just suddenly got up and walked home, and I felt as if the houses were sending me messages and getting all weird and frightening, and I was terrified… a psychosis is not like an on-off button but a kind of a dimmer switch; it ranges in degrees of intensity. And by this time I know my illness fairly well and it’s not uncommon for me to have a kind of transient psychotic thought and say, `Oh, that’s just my illness acting up.’ And one thing that’s stood me in good stead is, even when it gets worse, when I am really, really believing the crazy things, I always know that other people will think they’re crazy, and I’m motivated to not appear crazy so I’m able to kind of make my way in the world in that way. And then occasions where it’s just so intense and so profound, I just know not to be around people. Because I, you know, I don’t know what I’ll say. So for the most part I can control what I say even though I really can’t control what I think…”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12560033
The Negative “A’s”Psychiatrists have four terms, all beginning with the letter “A,” that they use to describe negative symptoms:
Alogia refers to difficulty communicating; people with alogia don’t speak much.
Affective flattening, also known as blunted affect, reflects a lack of emotional expression displayed by many people suffering from schizophrenia.
Avolition is a medical term used to describe the inability to form or initiate plans and to motivate oneself. It is pretty much the same as apathy.
Anhedonia describes an impaired ability to enjoy life and find pleasure in previously interesting activities. While it is not part of the definition of the disorder, it is an important associated feature of it.
These occur aside the “positive” symptoms of schizophrenia most people are more familiar with, such as visual/auditory hallucinations.
