I got this question over on the EHAB Tumblr: Can I ask why it’s not good to define yourself based on your mental illness? I mean I understand that I am complex and interesting beyond my depression, but sometimes I feel like people who say things like that are trying to get me to stop…
I recently gave a keynote presentation at Diabetes Linkup, a conference for Type 2 Diabetes bloggers, on the topic of overcoming stigma to connect with peers online. I was sharing lessons learned from the past four years of sharing about my brain. Whether it’s diabetes or mental illness, the challenges we run into online and the ways…
For OCD Week, I joined The Mighty for a live Q&A on their Facebook page all about my journey with recovery from mental illness. I usually keep my videos focused on mental health and where I’m going now, so I don’t often talk about the specific symptoms I struggled with but in this video I…
When I say that mental illness is like drowning and building better mental health is like learning how to swim, I’m not suggesting that mental illnesses aren’t real biological experiences. Drowning is a very biological experience. If we took some guy that doesn’t know how to swim and pushed him off the side of a…
You’re an expert in where you are now. But if you want to move to a place you’ve never been, it helps to speak with people who understand that new place. They understand the culture and the language of living in that place and the supports necessary to stay in that place. You need to…
OCD isn’t chronic. But mental health is, just like physical health. If you don’t take care of your physical health, it’s entirely normal to experience consequences from that. Mental health is no different.
I often get asked what supplements I took or what medications I took to recover from OCD and all of the things that went along with that. But I didn’t take any supplements or any medications. So this is how I usually answer the question:
When it comes to avoiding anxiety triggers, approach them in the same way you would if you had a physical injury: understand what’s causing the pain and stop that, do specific exercises to recover from the injury, and then gradually but consistently reintroduce the trigger, learning to embrace it in a healthy way so you…
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…
I often hear people talking about “normal” and wanting things to be the way they used to be before they got diagnosed with a mental illness. But normal and the way things used to be is what led to the way things are. Being normal is a lot like sitting in a psychologist’s waiting room–it’s…