When treating patients with serious mental illness (SMI), healthcare professionals need to keep the ultimate goal in mind: achieving better outcomes and improving quality of life. That might sound simple, but the reality can be much more complex – every patient is unique and will respond differently to […]
Focus on the client’s strengths
Self-harm is a way to cope with difficult emotions
Peers perform the same responsibilities, duties, and tasks as their higher-paid counterparts
Socializing is a skill set that’s multifaceted
Delusions put the ‘crazy’ in madness. Delusions can carve out the imaginary and marry it in misleading ways with a person’s orientation. Symptoms like this complicate and distort our reality and sense of self. Fantasies can remain dormant and not escalate. Other illusions break off and form systems […]
Psychotherapy’s primary focus should not be symptom management
I believe in self-determination
I had been searching for 4 years starting in 2003 for a treatment that could help my whole sense of being.
The mental health system brutally violated Vitor’s rights.
After Francisco’s passing family started researching and seeking the truth behind Francisco’s sudden death, they learned that he was not the only victim and was not an isolated case.
In society, “reality” is a cultural construct defined by the majority of that culture
I was led to believe I would be forever “sick” no matter how successful my recovery or how creative my writing production.
However, my efforts were not always enough, and on two occasions, I was given rental violations due to my disorganized apartment.
Sufferers from ‘depression’ have fearful difficulties in trying to come off antidepressants because they revert to their involutional melancholia.
Around the same time I registered for class I walked into a shrink’s office
Those of us with mental illness know full well that there are many challenges required of us. Acquiring and maintaining stable housing is one of the biggest challenges of them all. With a complicated condition, the healing journey can be difficult and even more dangerous without stable housing. […]
“Max, you have to come downstairs…”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN I’VE BEEN DISCHARGED?” “YOU’VE MISSED TWO SESSIONS. WE TALKED ABOUT ATTENDANCE, AND IN THIS CLINIC, IF YOU MISS TWO CONSECUTIVE SESSIONS, IT WILL RESULT IN YOUR DISCHARGE” “DISCHARGE? I’M GOING END UP IN THE HOSPITAL!” “YOU’RE ALWAYS WELCOME TO REAPPLY FOR TREATMENT WHEN YOU’RE READY […]
With therapy every other week and medication from a psychiatrist monthly, his life has improved
Sign me out right now!
Like most thoughts surrounding fear, paranoia, and anxious thinking, they all snowball
I would like to explore my own lived experience with first-onset psychosis
I would later find out that cases like Minerva exist everywhere, and she is no more unique than her biography is to other people with a mental health disorder who share their story.
My overreactions were to behaviors I considered as threatening
Mental Health Affairs 
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