Being addicted to Lush. lol
Two important points I would say are:
1) Alcohol and nicotine are both extremely hard addictions to fight. Bless all of you who have recognize them for what they are and have successfully treated them for a large part of your life.
2) I am finding from hundreds of cases I know of, many so-called therapists are pretty good at diagnosis but fail to learn about techniques that help their patients with pragmatic solutions. Many disorders have effective ways for us to alter our behavior, and with practice can make our problems much easier to deal with.
For those of you with specific diagnoses that you think are reasonably accurate, there are some great books so help you recognize when you have your psychological challenge, and to do specific things to help yourself.
I wonder how many people cause problems for themselves AND OTHERS by being in states of denial.
Please learn to love and have faith in yourselves.
I have OCD which manifests in arranging things and finishing tasks. It’s a lot better as I get older, maybe because I have more control over my life. I dunno.
"A dirty book is rarely dusty"
I suffer from misogyny and white privileged.
I don't suffer from any mental illness but I do cause blunt force trauma.
Garden-variety depression and anxiety disorder. Both aggressively and well-managed with medication.
Mental illness really needs to be seen as something no different from asthma or heart disease or a host of other chronic physical illnesses--manageable with medication (or treatment, if you prefer), but not curable and certainly not something that the ill person brought upon themselves.
Want to spend some time wallowing in a Recommended Read? Pick one! Or two! Or seven!
Wouldn't you rather have a nice cup of tea?
What is and is not a mental illness is not a fixed science. Rather, the definitions of 'insanity' have changed dramatically over history. Schizophrenics at one point were considered divine prophets and 'touched by god.' Depression was thought to be due to an imbalance of humours in the body (and now is being reconceptualized once more as an imbalance of brain chemistry, which is a similar idea, but with more scientific grounding). And it's only very recently that homosexuality was no longer considered a diagnosable form of madness. Substance Use Disorders (the current term for chemical addiction) are diagnosable mental health disorders included in the DSM (the big dictionary of disorders).
Using humour is sometimes therapeutic and sometimes defensive, but I haven't considered any of the jokes on this thread to be particularly offensive. However, I do appreciate the courage it's taken for some to post here, and would hope to keep the thread respectful, which includes avoiding tone-policing others for how they express themselves here.
Don't believe everything that you read.
My "mental illness" is LUSH??????
Does anyone here have a service dog? I was thinking of getting one.
More like an emotional support dog I guess.
I am still wary and distrustful of men.
Wouldn't you rather have a nice cup of tea?
I don't have a service dog, but I do have a dog, and she's pretty good company most of the time. Pets are great.
Don't believe everything that you read.
I suffer from bipolar syndrome - I dislike the term disorder - fortunately not in an extreme form, although I have experienced episodes of severe depression in the past. I have been through counselling and I was treated with an SSRI for several years but was able to stop when I started taking dopamine daily for severe restless leg syndrome.
In some of my poems I have tried to express what it means emotionally and intellectually to suffer from bipolar syndrome, and although the episodes of depression can be very unpleasant the highs are exhilarating and I would be sad to lose them.
I don’t have a pet dog or cat but I have no doubt that the gift of a wonderful granddaughter has been the reason that I have been free of all but the mildest episodes of depression for the last 21 months.