My brain repeats the refrain, “I’m in too much pain.” It does it over and over and over so many days of my life. This type of mental repetition seems to be a chronic pain implication. It irritates me because the word “pain” describes nothing because there is such a myriad of chronic pains I experience. I am in too much pain. Too much pain for what?
I’m reaching out today to tell everyone this: people do care about your mental health — especially right now, during the pandemic. I am one of these people. I have written a few posts on the COVID-19 pandemic and mental health now (listed below) and it’s because I’m hoping they will help the mental health of people dealing with pandemic challenges (which is basically everyone). But it’s not just me. Other people care about your mental health during this pandemic. I want to make this clear. I want to make it clear so that you know that while it’s hard, please don’t give up. People want to be there for you.
I’ve been talking about how the pandemic is affecting my mental health on social media quite a bit. I suppose many of us are. It’s a very hard-to-escape reality. Information (mostly depressing information) about the coronavirus pandemic is everywhere. But even when you avoid it, I find the pandemic affects mental health anyway. Here’s what the coronavirus pandemic is doing to my mental health and what I’m trying to do to counter it.
Sleeping with bipolar disorder is very hard so this article is devoted to talking about how to sleep with bipolar disorder, what sleep hygiene is and additional sleep tips. I’ve talked about some of these things before, but this post will bring together all the techniques I have previously discussed. Using all these sleep tips, I have been able to better regulate my sleep even with bipolar disorder, and I can tell you when I falter and don’t do these things, my sleep almost always suffers. Learning how to sleep with bipolar disorder has been hard, but good sleep hygiene and other positive sleep habits help.
I hate it when people say you need bad times to appreciate the good times. You need darkness to appreciate the light. You need the pain to appreciate the pleasure. This is such nonsense. I have had more bad, dark and painful times than anyone I know and believe me, I don’t feel the need for them — not now and not in the future. I appreciate good things. I am grateful for the light. I yearn for pleasure. But all the bad times didn’t make me appreciate the good times, I’m quite capable of doing that on my own.
I know everything feels out-of-control right now and this increases anxiety. Watch this video for ideas on how to regain your feelings of control to reduce your anxiety
The Uninvisible Podcast recently interviewed me, Natasha Tracy, and, honestly, I’m honored. Lauren Freedman, the host of The Uninvisible Podcast, gave me a chance to talk about what it’s really like to live with bipolar disorder and my personal history battling with the treatment of bipolar disorder, and, quite frankly, I made her laugh out loud. We taped the podcast at the HLTH Conference, where we both received WEGO Health Awards. If you’d like to know more about my personal story and what made our sound tech sit up in rapt attention, this podcast is for you.
Recently I talked to a doctor who reminded me that patient-blaming in mental illness is alive and thriving. For those of you not familiar, patient-blaming is when you, the person with mental illness, the patient, are blamed for the lack of treatment success. Unfortunately, this idea is actually baked into medicine’s nomenclature. People say things like, “I failed that medication,” or even, “I failed chemotherapy.” People know the intended meaning, of course, they mean that those treatments failed to make those people better. But the idea that language even exists in medicine really sets the stage for patient-blaming in mental illness.
I have considered, over the years, whether doctors care about patients. There are arguments on both sides of this one and, I admit, recently, my interactions with doctors would suggest that they don’t. But these are only the experiences I’ve had with doctors. So, when looking at them en masse, do doctors care about their patients or not?
Men’s mental health is the topic today. This piece is written by preeminent mental health speaker, Mike Veny.
Men’s mental health is in crisis, especially in America. The number of suicides is continuing to rise in our country and the statistics are scary. White men alone account for almost 70% of the suicide deaths each year. We need to begin to address men’s mental health so we can help them get the help they need before their challenges become a crisis.
Physical pain can affect suicidality and depression, of course, can affect one’s desire to commit suicide.* Both of these are seen in chronic illness. Those with a chronic or acute illness that causes great pain can cause a person to want to take their life and, of course, we know that about half of all people with bipolar disorder attempt suicide — mostly because of depression. (Physical illnesses may, themselves, lead to depression as well but we’ll skip that possibility right now.) I might suggest, however, that physical pain and depression** affect feelings of suicidality differently.
There are problems when you care what other people think of you. And the thing is, we all care — at least a little bit, at least at some point in our lives. It’s natural. We want other people to like us. This is biological. If people like you, they are more likely to protect you when a panther attacks or make sure you have food when it runs low. Caring about what others think of you literally may have kept you alive, historically. But in our modern-day, there are major problems with caring about what others think of you or of what you do.
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