Fostering happiness
Off the Beat
I can honestly say, however, that my biggest lifesavers were a set of three helpless foster kittens.
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Breaking up with my psychiatrist
I have never dealt well with change. My usual response to change is to curl into a ball and cease to function until I finally get used to my new reality.
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Time loss
Bear in Mind
My bed and I have a complicated, toxic love-hate relationship. Mental illness is exhausting and causes me to sleep a lot.
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From depression to addiction: dispelling mental health myths and mysteries
If mental illness has ever touched your life in a serious way as it has touched mine, you know that most of society’s perceptions and discussions about mental illness are less than ideal.
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How to throw words into the face of depression
I always wonder what people bustling around me think of the erratic snippets they catch of my daily phone conversations with my mother as I walk through Sproul Plaza.
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It doesn’t get better (and then, it does)
Bear in Mind
I have received a plentitude of terrible advice in my time as a Chronically Mentally Ill Person. One of my favorite (not at all appreciated) pieces of advice (that is not at all advice) is “It gets better!”
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Depression hurts
Bear in Mind
It can be easier to confront how we physically feel than to confront how we emotionally feel.
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Stick it to stigma
Bear in Mind
Stigma hasn’t gone away. It’s just more insidious. There is a limit to what is “acceptable” when it comes to having a mental illness.
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The thing that almost worked
Bear in Mind
The idea of zapping my brain felt like a last-ditch effort, as though my depression had become an unsolvable problem that required an extreme solution.
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Schools should prioritize students’ mental health
Local and national trends indicate that the mental health epidemic is far from over. UC Berkeley recently announced a switch to a new health insurance provider with a less-than-stellar reputation for reimbursing mental health-related care.
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