Blog
Interview with The OCD Stories Podcast
I sat down with Stuart from The OCD Stories for another wide-ranging interview (you can find the first one here) on a variety of mental health and OCD issues, from Internet/cellphone compulsions, to health anxiety, to false-memories, uncertainty, control, mindfulness, recovery, and why your therapist better start learning how to run marathons…
The City of Brains Project
Over at the CivicTechTO meetups, I’ve started up a project with a bunch of awesome volunteers to tackle a simple question: How do you find effective, accessible mental health services in Toronto? The answers, however, have been anything but simple. Each answer typically comes in the form of a story. And we’re finding that these are stories[…]
There are no OCD sub types or themes. Only OCD (and llamas).
It’s very popular in OCD patient communities, and in mental health communities in general, to get stuck on labeling superficial symptoms. But it becomes just another way to practice the judging and categorizing and discriminating that can fuel so many compulsions. A more effective approach to support recovery from OCD is to understand (and eliminate) the compulsive[…]
University Peer Health Engagement Workshop
This past weekend I was at the Toronto Peer Health Network’s annual symposium to facilitate a workshop on peer engagement. There were around 60 student leaders in the workshop who run peer health education programs at universities and colleges around Toronto. They’re working with their peers right around the age when all sorts of mental and[…]
Want to succeed with your New Year’s resolutions? Build the boat first.
If you’re starting off the new year with plans to make changes that will support recovery from mental illness, be honest about where you are and the skills you’ll need to learn to get to where you want to be. Our goals are often the results of the skills we need to learn, so be sure[…]
First episode of The OCD Stories podcast
Stuart Ralph has launched a podcast to go along with The OCD Stories site, all about exploring OCD and recovery from OCD. For the first episode of the podcast, which you can watch here in video, we discussed a slew of topics about recovering from OCD. Check it out:
Five big take-aways from MedX 2015
Stanford’s Medicine X conference was definitely the best health-related event of any kind I’ve ever attended. Launched by Dr. Larry Chu and an incredible group of collaborators a couple of years ago, it has grown into a special experience bringing together patients, healthcare practitioners, researchers, and technology companies to create change around major healthcare challenges that affect[…]
So you think you can’t recover from mental illness… (video)
Ruminating on reasons you can’t recover because your symptoms are different or you have very unique circumstances that prevent you from moving forward… is one of the most common symptoms. You’ll always be able to think of reasons why you can’t cut out compulsions, why you need to keep doing unhealthy things right now, why[…]
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About Mark
I create products and services to help people improve and maintain great mental health and fitness.
I have mental health. But by the time I recognized that, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, depression, and a bunch of related mental illnesses had consumed my life. But it didn’t have to be that way. I could have saved enormous amounts of pain, energy, and money, if I’d taken a more proactive, preventive approach to mental health much earlier in life. The focus of the work I do now is on making great mental health more accessible by leveraging technology and adapting design thinking tools from the world of business innovation, to support people making the biggest innovations of their lives: improving and maintaining their mental health.
I help people do that in a couple of different ways: I write about the stuff in our heads. And for any writing-related inquiries, contact Hattie Grunewald, at the Blake Friedmann Agency. I make videos to support people through the process of implementing evidence-based therapies in their lives. You can find my YouTube videos here. And if you'd like something more structured, check out the video courses in my Brainschool. I also provide one-on-one peer support, online, to people around the world, to help them make the complex changes involved with handling unwanted thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations as they do more of what actually matters to them. If you're interested in learning more about that, send me a message through the contact form.