Mark joined Stuart, from The OCD Stories, for another wide-ranging interview (check out the first one here) on a variety of mental health and OCD issues, from Internet compulsions, to health anxieties, to dealing with false-memories, uncertainty, control, mindfulness, recovery, and why your therapist better start learning how to run marathons…
A story submitted to the City of Brains Project by a woman in Toronto covers the complex, difficult journey of trying to get access to mental health help for OCD. It’s so frustrating that there are evidence-based treatments, very well-supported by research, but they’re not actually made available to people. As you can see in the story, […]
It’s very popular in OCD patient communities, and in mental health communities in general, to get stuck on labeling superficial symptoms. But it becomes just another way to practice the judging and categorizing and discriminating that can fuel so many compulsions. A more effective approach to support recovery from OCD is to understand (and eliminate) the compulsive […]
Mark: What has helped the most with taking care of your mental health? Josie: I find this question difficult to answer because I can’t think of a singular entity that has helped my mental health the most overall, I think different issues are helped by different things. I suppose if I had to narrow it […]
Recent research from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, published in the American Journal of Physiology — Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, links early-life stress with increased norepinephrine in the upper gut, potentially leading to indigestion and anxiety problems later in life (in rats). Press release. Study (Full text PDF). Basically, what they showed is […]
When I was doing Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP) therapy for OCD, it was very behavior-focused. It was all about progressively cutting out compulsions, starting from the easiest and working up to the most difficult. Although ERP is a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), it’s generally heavier on the B than the C. But […]
Mark: What has helped the most with taking care of your mental health? Annie: When I was in the lowest point of my depression and anxiety, I tried pulling myself out of it through self help books and online articles about cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness, but the biggest breakthrough I made in my recovery […]
This past March, the Catholic News Agency in Rome published an article titled, “How can you tell if someone is demon-possessed?”. In it, Father Cipriano de Meo, an exorcist since 1952, explains that discerning the difference between demon possession and mental illness is an important part of the exorcist’s role because, “typically, a person is […]
Mark: What has helped the most with taking care of your mental health? Kianni: I think the thing that’s helped me to take care of my mental health is being aware of how the brain works. I believe I was able to really move forward in taking care of my mental health with a combination […]