mental health

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They Say I Have Her Eyes, Did I Also Inherit His Pain

CW: This post deals with trauma and the resulting mental repercussions and includes mentions of sexual assault and the holocaust.

 

Ever since I was a baby, people have compared me to my parents. When I was younger, my parents would often be told I resembled my father. As I grew older, the comments changed. I was now told I look almost exactly like my mother. I got my mother’s acute sense of smell and taste. It’s easy to point out the observable traits I inherited from my mother, but I may have gotten even more than that. According to recent scientific studies, my mental health may have been affected by my mother’s trauma. Continue reading →

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Mental disorder, where mind, body, and society meet and create identities

Thinking about mental health, part 1:

I begin this post with a question: How can we tell if someone has a mental disorder? According to the National Alliance for Mental Health, “a mental illness is a disease that causes mild to severe disturbances in thought and/or behavior, resulting in an inability to cope with life’s ordinary demands and routines.” According to Wikipedia, it is “is a diagnosis, most often by a psychiatrist, of a behavioral or mental pattern that may cause suffering or a poor ability to function in life.”

What’s most interesting to me is that there are two parts to the definition- “A disturbance in mental thought/pattern”, and “Affects the individuals’ ability to function in life.” Taken at face values, these make perfect sense, if someone has abnormal mental thoughts and it makes them unable to function normally, then they have a mental disorder. Now, what are we comparing “abnormal” to? The “normal” identity, which has been crafted by society.

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Anxiety: A Common Body Story

I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which means my brain doesn’t know when to stress out about something and when not to. Two of my closest friends also have anxiety, and in a weird way I think it’s made us closer. The stress from our anxiety affects our minds and our bodies. Continue reading →

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Mental Illness and Everyone Around

mental-health-disorders            One of the topics that struck me the most in class the last few weeks was when we talked about mental illness and the people whose loved ones have mental illness. When people talk about mental illness, whether it be their own or just as a general topic, it’s hardly mentioned how other people are affected by someone’s mental illness. Yes the focus should be on the person who it working through this ordeal but it can also affect the others around. Continue reading →

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My Mind Could Never Be Quiet

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The Book, “An Unquiet Mind” follows the story of Kay Redfield Jamison journey with bipolar disorder. I had to read this book for one of my college classes and was not looking forward to it. I have been on my own journey with bipolar disorder and was afraid the author would portray people with bipolar disorder, as being “crazy”, but aren’t people with bipolar disorder crazy anyway? Continue reading →

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I Know You Told Me I’m Healthy, But I Really Think You Should Check One More Time

TW: death, sudden death, mental illness
My body freaks me out. I’ve never really understood how to embody it properly, to feel right in it. I guess there is no wrong way to embody your body, but I have always felt confused and afraid of my own. There’s so much about it that I can’t know—so much that is left automatic, and so much that could go wrong—and that inability to really, confidently know if I am safe in my body has literally driven me crazy at points in my life.

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