One of the reasons I originally started to share about mental health and recovery skills was because I was fortunate to get effective help, but when I started to join online mental health communities, I would hear people sharing about the help they were getting, and it wasn’t at all in line with where the…
I’ve been facilitating workshops for years, in mental health and business strategy. Adapting design thinking exercises to mental health has been so effective. It’s engaging but it’s also incredibly useful for understanding complex challenges we’re running into and seeing solutions to get out of them. The thing is, though, traveling for an in-person workshop to…
I was part of a panel discussion at the University of Toronto recently on community engagement work in the mental health sector. It was exciting to see so many people interested in working in mental health. The questions and comments from the audience made it clear that they understood the need for patient-centered innovation and they…
When I was doing Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP) therapy for OCD, it was very behavior-focused. It was all about progressively cutting out compulsions, starting from the easiest and working up to the most difficult. Although ERP is a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), it’s generally heavier on the B than the C. But…
In anticipation of this year’s Medicine X Conference, some reflections on one of the stickiest problems in mental healthcare innovation… In less than a month, the Medicine X and Medicine X | Ed conferences will kick-off in Palo Alto, exploring the intersections of emerging technologies, healthcare, and design, with an emphasis on empowering patients to…
I was recently part of a design workshop with local government and mental health services, exploring how to collaborate better around delivering effective mental health services. As a former Executive Director of a peer support charity, and a former mental health service user, I’ve had the opportunity to be on both sides of the equation.…
When it comes to the question of what causes Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, the simple answer is that the causes are complex. But what I really want to emphasize when it comes to any anxiety disorder, is that it really doesn’t matter who or what is responsible for getting you to where you are. What matters…