Ashley’s family sadly wishes to inform her readers that she passed away on October 9th. She could no longer bear the suffering she was experiencing and finally succumbed to her severe depression. Her obituary can be found at: dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/vancouver-bc/ashley-peterson-10985838## Thank you for supporting her blog as we know it was very important to her and helped give her life purpose. The post A message from Ashley’s family appeared first on Mental Health @ Home ..read more

We all get spammy new followers, but what exactly is the point? In this post, I thought we could chat about that. First, what do I mean by spammy followers? I’m talking about people who are following your blog for reasons other than having any intention of reading it. I would consider a good 90% of my new followers to be spammy, and I will never see them again after that new follow shows up in my notifications. So if the intention isn’t to read a blog, what’s the point of following it? I see two main reasons why people might do that. One is that they’re hoping that you play the follow-for-fol ..read more

Overcoming Stress-Induced Brain Fog by Jill Weber covers ten strategies to find focus and make your mind work better. It’s aimed at people who are experiencing brain fog due to chronic stress rather than due to illness. The book draws on concepts from cognitive behavioural therapy (ACT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness. The book begins by explaining how chronic stress affects the mind and body, and then there’s a chapter devoted to each of the ten strategies, including overcoming survival mode with emotional awareness and overcoming irritability and stress with mindfu ..read more

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is attention. We are constantly bombarded with a steady stream of stimuli, both internal and external. Attention is the process by which we narrow our focus to certain pieces of information. This is necessary because our capacity to process information is limited. Selective attention Selective attention refers to the ability to focus on certain environmental stimuli while ignoring other distractions. The cocktail party effect is an example of selective attention to auditory input. If you’re ch ..read more

I was recently browsing the blog of Pete Earley, the author of the book Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, and I came across a post on a recent Manhattan Institute report criticizing Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think tank, and I’ve previously taken issue with In Defense of Stigma, an article by MI fellow Stephen Eide. I was expecting to be entirely unimpressed by the report on MHFA, and while it certainly had some flawed assumptions, it also made some interesting points that I wanted to discuss. The report, written b ..read more

A lot of us having social sharing buttons on our blogs, but how often do people actually use them? I have no idea, so I thought it would be interesting to chat about it. I don’t often use social sharing buttons. Certainly, a substantial part of that is because my social media use is minimal, but even when I’m somewhat more active, I don’t often share people’s posts. The social platform I share on most often is Pinterest, but because I do most of my reading in the WordPress Reader, I’m not usually seeing social share buttons, and I would typically just copy the post’s URL and paste it directly ..read more

Rawpixel Here’s what happened in my life over the past week: Someone has been establishing an online presence sort of pretending to be me and sort of pretending to be A Guy Called Bloke, which was the name of a blog that used to be run by my friend Rory. I discovered this via Ahrefs, a site that, among other things, tells me about new backlinks to my site. The weirdness includes: a Mental Health @ Home profile on Taplink, a Russian Linktree-type site. It links to a post of mine on social proof, another fake profile for me, and profiles on Anchor and Blogger supposedly for A Guy Called Bloke ..read more

You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health by Ken Duckworth, NAMI’s medical director, is the first book released by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The book includes excerpts from interviews with 130 people who either self-identify as having a mental illness or have a loved one who does, and the author writes, “Mental illness and recovery are human experiences, so I consider experience-based evidence an authoritative source for this book.” The book opens with the author talking about his history with NAMI and his family’s experience with his father’s bipolar illnes ..read more

In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is thought-action fusion. Thought-action fusion (TAF) happens when people believe there is an equivalence between thoughts and actions. It was first described by researchers in relation to OCD, although it’s not exclusive to OCD. There are a couple of different kinds of TAF. Likelihood TAF involves the belief that thinking about something makes it more likely to happen, and moral TAF involves the belief that thinking about an action is the moral equivalent to that action being performed or tha ..read more

People had a lot to say in response to my recent post Suicidality and Other People’s Perspective, so I thought it would be good to have another down and dirty chat about the reality of dealing with suicidal thinking (and sometimes attempts). In this post, we’ll talk about the tendency to be impulsive and engaging in drawn-out, detailed planning. I won’t talk about specific methods, but I will refer to attempts, so skip this post if you’d rather not go there. I first experienced suicidal ideation and attempted suicide back in 2007, when I had my first major depressive episode. I’m a planner in ..read more