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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
Receiving or providing mental health treatment requires significant amounts of tolerance and acceptance on every side of the equation (and it’s an equation with many sides). When seeking treatment, we can often trip over our judgments and let our short-term likes and dislikes become massive barriers to what’s going to make us happy in the…
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: