It’s July, which means it’s the month the disabled community has chosen to celebrate disability pride month! Celebrating pride is all about increasing visibility, awareness, and care for a marginalized community. If you are looking for a way to do that this July, read on!
Tag: depression
Poetry & Trauma: It Is Hard to Write with a Broken Heart
This week my debut poetry book, “Pet: the Journey from Abuse to Recovery” comes out. The poetry sequence takes you through my experiences in an abusive relationship, my attempts to heal, my retrospective reflections on the relationship, and the larger-scale insights that came with long-term healing. To introduce it, I wanted to share with you this piece about what it took to write that book in the first place.
What Does Dissociation Feel Like?
How did I spend ten years of receiving treatment from eight different therapists, as well as doing my own research on mental health, and never realize I was dissociating so much? Because I didn’t realize what I was feeling was dissociation!
Early Signs That I Had Dissociative Identity Disorder
When I was first diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, I was pretty shocked. I didn’t exhibit a lot of the most obvious signs I had seen in media. To help reorient myself, I began carefully reviewing the chapters of my life and looking for the hidden signs of DID that I had previously missed. I ended up finding quite a few.
Article on Medium: Why Does Everything Feel So Hard Right Now If I’m Fine
Soon after the beginning of the pandemic, I found that if I didn’t work hard to use my systems and tools meant to support my mental health, my functionality would quickly deteriorate. I frequently felt like I wasn’t okay and also that I had no business feeling that way.
How Physicians Can Be Better Mental Health Resources
Physicians can have a major impact on how we treat, understand, and confront our mental health. But, I’d like to offer that we, the patients, have much to teach physicians about approaching mental health care.
It Can’t Be That Bad: How the Medical System Let Me Fall Through the Cracks
As more and more stories of medical neglect as a result of marginalization are brought to light, I hope that we can collectively reduce that disconnect and bring understanding and accommodation of marginalized backgrounds into our medical system, rather than using the medical system to further enforce their oppression. Maya Strong’s guest post today is one of those stories.
Signed, the Daughter You May Someday Know
CN: graphic description of self-harm; discussion of suicide, teen homelessness, homophobia, religious opposition to homosexuality, familial rejection, and mental illness. Every openly LGBTQ+ person has a coming-out story. I grew up in an incredibly liberal town where bisexuality or any kind of sexual fluidity was common enough that I encountered very little resistance when I came out, which is why I haven’t written much about my own experience regarding sexual orientation on this blog. The …Read More
A Comprehensive Guide to Assisting with a Mental Health Crisis
Over the course of three months, guest blogger Lucy Merriman put together an amazing 5-part series entitled, How to Lend a Hand in a Mental Health Crisis. The series looks at the gaps in our current mental health care system and provides information on how to fill those gaps on an individual basis, even if you yourself have little to no crisis training. This post puts the links and summaries for those five articles all in one place.
How to Lend a Hand in a Mental Health Crisis Part 5: Seeking Solutions
The fifth part of Lucy Merriman’s guide to offering support during a mental health crisis is possibly the most universally helpful of all the parts. It includes useful problem solving techniques, basic guidelines to finding the info you need, and an amazing list of mental health related media.