Tag: stigma

Coffee Good for Depression. Sybil Revealed. Bipolar Questions Answered. – 3 New Things

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Oct 16, 2011

Keep up with mental health news. Three new things in mental health to learn this week:

The more coffee (caffeine) your drink, the less likely you’ll be depressed
Clinical records of real-life Sybil (part of the basis of “multiple personality disorder”) show likely falsehoods and unethical treatment
Get your bipolar questions answered by a clinical psychologist

Mental Illness Stigma Affects Psychiatrists Too – Who Wants to Be a Psychiatrist?

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Oct 9, 2011

Recently I read Invisible Tattoos: The stigma of psychiatry by Dr. Henry A. Nasrallah in Current Psychiatry. Invisible Tattoos is and editorial piece on how the stigma of mental illness affects psychiatrists just like it affects the mentally ill. And my reaction?

Oh cry me a freaking river.

I thought the piece was a little whiny and navel-gazing. I mean seriously, these people are respected professionals making lots of money – they don’t have an illness threatening to kill them every day.

But then I got a comment from a medical student and I reconsidered my position. Maybe antipsychiatry poster-boy Tom Cruise doesn’t just fuck around with the way people look at me, maybe he fucks around with the way people look at psychiatrists too. And maybe stigma is difficult for psychiatrists to deal with.

Antipsychotic Warning, Saffron for Depression, Polypharmacy – 3 New Things

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Sep 8, 2011

It’s a bit of a short week what with the holiday and all, but still, there is time for three new things about mental health. Today’s three new things are:

A safety warning on the atypical antipsychotic drug asenapine maleate (Saphris)
Saffron and depression
Multi-drug (polypharmacy) treatment of mental illness

New Antipsychiatry Discussion, L-Theanine, Rapid Cycling Markets – 3 New Things

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Sep 1, 2011

This week’s three new things include:

A new supplement that may help brain health and mental illness: l-theanine
A poor comparison between rapid cycling bipolar disorder and the financial markets
A new discussion of antipsychiatry

Mental Health Information – 3 New Things

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Aug 4, 2011

Sometimes writing for a living drives me bonkers. Basically, I have to be brilliant on-command. And seriously. That’s hard.

You. Write. Be brilliant. Now!

It’s a lot of work for me. My brilliance gets tired and bogged down in the bits of my job I don’t like doing.

However, then I’m reminded there are many wonderful things about my job. Specifically, I get to learn new things, every day, all the time. While others work at real jobs I spend all day looking up facts and studies and learning things I didn’t know when I woke up.

I love that stuff.

3 Things I’ve Learned About Mental Health

Three New Mental Health Articles

So, I’m creating a weekly feature by sincerely flattering Jane Friedman and stealing her idea. (Jane writes Three Happy Things about writing once a week. Go check her out.) I’m not sure they will be three happy things, exactly, but I will be sharing three new things about mental health I’ve learned each week.

This will give me a chance to share smaller details that don’t make it into a full blog post, pimp the resources I like and otherwise share my knowledge.

On board? Great!

What you should be Reading in Mental Health

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Jun 3, 2011

Busy. Crazy. Crazy busy. New antipsychotic. You know how it is.

Mental Illness Articles You Should Read

As per the usual, however, I plow through my own research materials like a crazy person possessed. So I do know of many excellent articles you should be reading.

Check out these articles from Breaking Bipolar and other great sources:

Schizophrenia Awareness Fights Fear and Stigma – This is a video embedded in a post at Breaking Bipolar and has been quite well-received. Please take a look at this short piece and learn something about a mental illness that most people irrationally fear.
Do Mental Illness Diagnoses Matter? – Sometimes people argue that diagnoses are too broad and overlap too much. I’ve even heard of doctors not wanting to tell their patients their diagnosis because they don’t want them “hung up on it.” But I argue that even if ill-fitting mental illness diagnoses do matter. (Also read a good piece about addiction terminology. Did you know “addiction” isn’t in the DSM?)
Doctors Asking Questions About Suicide – Sometimes it seems like the questions doctors ask about suicidal thought are useless, but I don’t think they are.
How to Handle the Common Symptoms of Schizophrenia – This is an amazing document by the British Columbia Schizophrenia Society. This is so clear and so useful that I think it’s a must-read for anyone that has or knows someone with any mental illness. It will not just tell you about schizophrenia and psychosis, but will tell you about mental illness thought processes in general. (Also, How Friends and Families can Handle Psychosis.)
Scientific and Consumer Models of Recovery in Schizophrenia: Concordance, Contrasts, and Implications – Interesting paper that discusses various treatments including medication and non-medication based. Yes, it’s long but there are some interesting bit in there.

Hope you enjoy, I’ll be back with fresh content next week.

Psychiatric Myths Dispelled by Doctor — Fighting Antipsychiatry

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Apr 5, 2011

Or How Antipsychiatry Groups are Wrong

If you’re been reading my writings here at the Bipolar Burble for a while, you’ve probably gathered that I don’t like antipsychiatry groups. These groups are often under the “mad pride” flag or “psychiatric survivors” or people for “human rights” or people fighting psychiatric abuses. Often the language they use is solely designed to convince you that psychiatry is evil, psychiatry should be stopped, no one should take psychiatric medication and in many cases, psychology is also evil. Many antipsychiatry groups are sneaky. Antipsychiatry groups sounds reasonable on first glance but it’s only once you dig into them that you see how insidious they are.

Antipsychiatry groups are ridiculous.

I’ve tried to look into antipsychiatry groups to see if there’s something worth understanding but they have no evidence. Just ardent supporters that make wild claims without proof. And their tactics of cruel, personal, abusive attacks are not worth my time. It assures that their groups have no credibility whatsoever.

I Fight Antipsychiatry Groups

And sometimes I spend entire days fighting antipsychiatry people. Antipsychiatry shows up on the Bipolar Burble, antipsychiatry finds me on Twitter, antipsychiatry follows me to Facebook, antipsychiatry shows up on Breaking Bipolar. And these charming antipsychiatry folks, for whatever reason, read all about me and then use those person details to ensure their personal attacked will be as nasty as possible.

Breaking Bipolar Articles You Should Read – Updated Resources

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Mar 29, 2011

As most of you know, in addition to the Bipolar Burble I also author Breaking Bipolar on HealthyPlace.com. I write a column there twice a week as well as produce one bipolar-themed video and two audio files per month. It’s a fairly well-received bipolar blog often with much discussion, feedback and sharing.

Recent Breaking Bipolar Blog Highlights

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Breaking Bipolar lately, here are a few of the highlights:

How to Help Someone with a Mental Illness – A new piece yesterday in response to someone’s query about helping their newly-diagnosed loved one with bipolar disorder. Helping someone with a mental illness is a huge challenge but these tips seem to be striking a chord with people.
Mental Illness Treatment and Risk Tolerance – I like this writing a lot. The article talks about how some people are willing to accept greater risk in their chosen treatment of mental illness. It’s about respect and choice.
Bipolar Disorder and Treatment Stigma – Yes, I was talking about electroconvulsive therapy here but don’t reference ECT directly. I don’t like to bring the hugely contentious issues or opinions onto Breaking Bipolar due to the wide audience and huge amount of (likely negative) reaction it will receive. I do, however, think it’s important to discuss the issues around bipolar/depression/mental illness treatment whether specific or not.
Mental Illness is Only a Problem when Mental Illness is a Problem – This is essentially in response to people saying every behavior is being labelled a “disorder.” My point is that people only get help when their issues rise to the level of a problem.
Why Don’t we Shower When we’re Sick – A popular article on the question of forgoing showers when extremely ill. I present four reasons.
Zealotry and Rules for Debating Mental Illness – I wrote this article in response to the people who insist on making mental illness discussion into nasty, name-calling, unscientific, overly-emotional fighting. Really drives me bonkers.
Shame and Electroconvulsive Therapy – When I got electroconvulsive therapy I experienced a lot of shame. This really is unnecessary and illogical but has to do with the massive stigma on receiving ECT treatments. (Excellent comment about stigma and ECT treatment here.)
Minimizing Mental Illness – The Worst Things to Say – Most popular overall article with over 20,000 reads. I added a bonus worst thing to say so someone with a mental illness here on the Bipolar Burble as well.

Upcoming Bipolar Burble Articles

I’m sure that’s more than enough for now. Upcoming pieces on the Bipolar Burble will likely be about hypomania and delusions and possibly regarding the black box warning on antidepressants actually increasing suicides (you can yell at me about that after I write it). There will probably be a piece about my own ECT experience as well as that’s not really covered here (I wrote quite a bit about it on another blog.)

If you’d like to see a topic covered on the Bipolar Burble or Breaking Bipolar or have a question you can always contact Natasha Tracy. I can’t promise I’ll respond but I’ll do my best.

New Mental Health Resources Added

The bipolar and mental health resources page has also been updated. These are good resources you should know about.

Myths, Realities and Journey Through ECT – by BiPolar Badger

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Mar 22, 2011

This post was controversial even before posted; clearly underscoring how much people need to talk about ECT. The Bipolar Burble welcomes Steven Schwartz, the BiPolar Badger, and his experiences with electroconvulsive therapy.

Myths, Realities and Journey Through ECT – by the BiPolar Badger

I was 9-years-old in 1975 when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came out. I remember watching it on our floral, pleather sofa, late one night on TV. It scared the crap out of me; this was the first time in my life I saw E.C.T. (electroconvulsive therapy, previously electroshock therapy or shock therapy) and little could I imagine that one day I would find myself in McMurphy’s position.