I always enjoy collaborating with OCD UK because they have such a helpful focus on recovery and promoting effective treatments for overcoming OCD, so when they launched an online conference this year, hosted at “Hotel Recovery”, just as I’m wrapping up a decade post recovery, I figured it’d be a great time to talk about…
My post on the newly launched Unsinkable Stories is all about an issue that I now know is quite common when people are making progress on recovery from mental illness, but it’s not something anybody had prepared me for when I was interacting with the mental healthcare system. Overcoming this challenge is key to preventing…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has evolved and changed significantly over the years. CBT is a category of therapies that include cognitive and behavioral components. It’s a category in the same way that “cardio” is a category of exercise. What a person does within that category, can lead to profoundly different outcomes. And the exercises evolve over…
Be 👏 kind👏 to👏 yourself👏 When I started out taking care of my mental health and digging out of the mental illness hole, I had to make a lot of changes around things I thought were totally normal and necessary. Making those changes were tough because I’d spent years practicing and perfecting compulsions that made…
We could also call this: Recovery is like rowing. You’ll be bad at both until you’re not. And then you’ll just push harder. If you’re working with a personal trainer on your physical fitness, it’s not strange if you expect to work with somebody that’s in better shape than you, that practices the skills you…
I think back to when I was a pre teen and there was so much happening, not only physically but also mentally… That’s when I first recall OCD happening to me–I was around 12 years old and I began to count and touch doors, handles, count my steps, turn off the TV at the “right…
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…
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…
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…