Category Archives: Psychology
I Don’t Have the Words
After reading my two-parter about why it can be so hard to talk about depression, a friend sent me this article: 18 Words for Sadness & Depression That Don’t Exist in English. It is exactly what it sounds like. Some of the words are helpful. For instance, the Pitjantjatjara (aboriginal Australian) word “Watjilpa” apparently describes […]
Share this:
What Is Mental Illness?
Asking what mental illness is might seem a little silly. I mean depression, anxiety, bipolar, OCD, schizophrenia, etc., etc., etc. are mental illnesses, right? Yes, of course they are. But I mean the question more generally. I don’t want examples of mental illnesses. I want to know what makes something a mental illness. AIDS, Covid, […]
Share this:
I’m Feeling Better Today and Why That’s a Bit of a Problem for This Mental Health Project
I had a bad day yesterday. It prevented me from writing about what I had intended writing about. Instead, I just tried to describe some of the feelings I was having. I didn’t think it was very good, but a bunch of people reached out with words of support. That was nice even though it […]
Share this:
A Bad Day
I’m not having a good day. It sucks. There’s the obvious reason it sucks, you know, because I’m having a bad day. But it also sucks because I’ve started this little mental health project and I don’t want to stumble and lose all my momentum after only a few days. But I’m not capable of […]
Share this:
Why Is (Insert Mental Health Condition Here) Hard to Talk About? – Part 2
When I started this post yesterday, I wasn’t intending to write a two-parter. I was talking about the reasons the mental health conversation is so hard to have, even in an ideal world where everyone is kind and supportive and wants to understand. While talking about how the symptoms of depression make depression hard to […]
Share this:
Why Is (Insert Mental Health Condition Here) Hard to Talk About? – Part 1
If we’re going to have the big mental health conversation, there’s something that we need to get out of the way first. It’s a hard conversation. I mean really hard. And I’m not talking about all the baggage that comes with it like the embarrassment, stigma, shame, resentment, and all that. Those are real and […]
Share this:
Mental Health – Let’s Have This Conversation
Last year, I wrote a piece for a friend’s website called “The Conversation Around Mental Health Is Long Overdue – and We’re Screwing It Up“. I said we were making two mistakes. The first was that we are focusing too much on celebrity in this conversation. I talked about Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles in […]
Share this:
4
I was playing I Declare War with a friend over the weekend, and getting my butt kicked. The problem was that when we came to a card war, the card I played to win it was the number 4. It happened so many times that I jokingly pointed it out, but after a while my […]
Share this:
Mental Health and the Holidays
Every holiday season, at least since the advent of social media, I see people asking other people to be aware of people who struggle during the holidays. They want us to be sensitive; to watch what we say and do. As far as I can tell, the requests for sensitivity rarely come from people who […]
Share this:
Connections
The song Levon, by Elton John (@eltonofficial) and Bernie Taupin (#bernietaupin), opens with the line: Levon wears his war wound like a crown He calls his child Jesus ‘Cause he likes the name And he sends him to the finest school in town Then, there’s a line in Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s song Tiny […]
Recent Comments