Blogs
There are many reasons people die by suicide when living with mental illness, but I'm going to focus on three. Suicide is an all-too-common outcome of mental illness, and most suicides have untreated mental illness as a factor. But what drives a person to the edge? What overrides the instinct for self-preservation and causes a person to end it all? I've attempted suicide, and these three reasons people die by suicide hit closest to home for me.
The parenting questions I've been wrestling with recently are how much independence to allow my son with mental illness and how do I foster independence for him. Should I be a "helicopter mom" or a "free-range parent"? Sadly, I don't have a pilot's license, and my children aren't livestock, so I have no idea. I can tell you, though, that the question of independence is an entirely different one for my daughter who doesn't have a mental illness than it is for my son who does (Siblings of Children with Mental Illness). How do I foster independence in my child with mental illness?
Laziness and depression can look almost alike, but they're very different states of being. For example, every once in awhile, you will have a lazy day. After you come home from work, you might neglect doing laundry and crawl into bed instead. Maybe you’ll turn on Netflix, have a snack, and fall asleep. It feels nice, right? We all need the rest. But what does it mean when one or two lazy days turns into a few lazy weeks? Is it laziness or depression?
I've learned that finding your passion is critical in eating disorder recovery. Passion is what keeps us pushing through life, through the worst and the best of days it remains a driving force. While a prisoner of my eating disorder, I lost passion for any and all things this life had to offer. I realized during my eating disorder recovery journey that passion is something we need to reconnect with to find the strength to keep persevering in wellness.
I express the experience of having bipolar disorder in a very specific way – my way. I express the bipolar experience with my words, my language, my thoughts and my metaphors. I approach bipolar disorder the way I live it: primarily depressed with short bouts of hypomania or bipolar mixed moods. I often write politically incorrectly if I feel that expresses my bipolar experience more accurately. But one thing I have learned after doing this for many years is that not everyone likes this.
Hello, I’m Susan Traugh, one of the authors of Life with Bob about parenting children with mental illness at HealthyPlace. I live with a husband with bipolar disorder and have three children with mental illness: two with bipolar disorder and one with generalized anxiety disorder.
Schizophrenia can make life unpredictable in that you never know what side of the bed you’re going to get up on, so to speak. With schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, you have good days and bad days. Today got off to a rocky start thanks to the unpredictability of living with schizophrenia.
I used to be certain that nothing--not even mindfulness--would quiet my anxiety. I found it difficult to be still because of anxiety's constant stream of racing thoughts, tumultuous emotions, and halting actions. Not only could I not be present in each moment, I didn't want to be present in each moment. I worried that if I stopped being anxious, I wouldn't earn success in any of the areas of my life. Anxiety had tricked me into believing that without it, I couldn't move forward into a quality life. I used to listen to anxiety, but no longer. I found success once I used mindfulness to quiet my anxiety.
There are people who fake having mental illness for many reasons, and dissociative identity disorder (DID) is one of the many illnesses that is faked. Some people claim to have DID, then come out to friends, family, and/or support groups that they have been faking their DID. But is it really faking, or is there something else really going on?
I’m Brittany Clements and I’m thrilled to join the Relationships and Mental Illness blog at HealthyPlace. While I wasn’t officially diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (our generalized anxiety disorder test) until my late teens, it’s a condition I’ve undoubtedly struggled with my entire life, exacerbated by an accompanying diagnosis of epilepsy.
Where do we go from here? Most of the family thinks just to let her hit bottom and then if she reaches out to help any we can. Some want to just keep paying her bills and just let her sit in the house with no responsibilities. Never been on medication and impossible to get to her when she refuses to talk to ANYONE.
Help.
On the day we agreed to videochat to make things less awkward IRL she woke up with a migraine so we rescheduled to the day after, I made sure to assure her that it was okay and to take her time. Later that day, in the late evening we had a nice chat but suddenly she stopped replying, even though nothing had happened. The day after I texted her good morning and said I hope she was feeling a little better. she wouldn't open my texts.
A couple days after I sent her a longer text saying that even though I had only known her for a short time I care a lot for her and would like to know how she are doing, telling her I'm there for her, assuring her I'm not going anywhere even though things might not be very easy. She wouldn't open it.
A week later I sent a text saying not to feel bad about not answering and that I will be there when she is able to answer again. It's been two weeks since this and she still hasn't opened my texts. She hasn't been active at all.
I don't know what else I can do. I assumed she might have fallen into a depression. I have tried to just not think about it anymore, and I haven't that much but when I do it sort of kills me inside...