I’ve got generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and I’ve also got some serious issues with concentration. As in, my ability to concentrate on almost anything for more than five minutes at a time stinks. There are some days when I can barely string two coherent thoughts together, and I swear my brain is turning into mush.Read More →
More than 40 landmarks across Canada will be lit up with purple lights across on Oct. 10, World Mental Health Day, including a few in the Tri-Cities. And Carol Todd would like to see many more. The Port Coquitlam teacher, whose daughter committed suicide in 2012, is hoping everyone wears purple or puts up purple lights as part of the Light Up Purple 2014 campaign to spark a conversation on mental health and the need for awareness, support and resources.Read More →
Antidepressants are commonly used to treat social phobia, but a new report argues that “talk therapy” is the better first option. In a review of 101 clinical trials, researchers found that “cognitive behavioral therapy” often helped people with social phobia — a type of anxiety disorder where people have a deep fear of being judged by others or embarrassed in public. The more common approach to tackling social anxiety — antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) — also helped, the review found.Read More →
Do you face mental health stigma in the workplace? Learn how to let go of the ‘doom and gloom’ attitude and empower yourself to deal with workplace stigma.Read More →
By Marisa Lancione Published by Healthy Minds Canada Living with a chronic mental illness can sometimes feel like waiting for the other shoe to drop (hopefully it’s at least something stylish). Up until this point, I have distanced my writing from my present by focusing on my past. Well, I’m going to take a huge leap of faith and discuss the state of my current mental health. And the fact is, I’m struggling. I’ve been battling semi-regular panic attacks for the past 6 months. My first panic attack in years happened in March. As with most panic attacks, they happen at the most inopportune moments.Read More →
Four days before Orlando da Silva became president of the Ontario Bar Association this month he heard the news that comedic genius Robin Williams had taken his own life. “I imagined Robin Williams alone in his room, what went through his mind,” da Silva told TorStar News Service this week. “I can understand the thinking, I can understand the emotions.” The new OBA president has also lived with the torment of depression, the sense of bone-deep worthlessness and lacerating self-disgust. He came close, in fact, to taking his own life.Read More →
BELLEVILLE – Michael Teasdale never thought about killing himself. But he did feel like curling up in a corner and letting life roll over him until it flattened him out of existence. The Stirling man and Loyalist College student was just one of the walkers in Wednesday’s Defeat Depression at the school, aimed at raising awareness of mental illness.Read More →
To some, anxiety is a taboo term. To one student, it was seven letters that defined her life. At the age of 12, second-year Ryerson journalism student Emily Aubé was diagnosed with panic and generalized anxiety disorder. Both conditions put her through great stress and pressure growing up. “In high school, there were no resources that helped me and I felt very much ashamed of my disorder in fear of being labeled as ‘mental’ or ‘crazy,’” Aubé said.Read More →
Last November, I was diagnosed with depression. Depression is an illness which provokes a wide range of reactions in people, depending on their own experiences. It is, to me, something intangible- just when I think I’ve understood its impact on my life and those around me, it slips away and mutates into something else. Some days I am able to brush it aside, other days it lies on me like a hot, heavy, suffocating blanket, preventing me from doing anything and leaving me tearful with frustration. I think for sufferers and for those who deal with them, be it friends, family or colleagues, depression isRead More →
When Elizabeth Manley opened the door and saw her mother for the first time in weeks, her mother collapsed on her knees and began to cry. Since moving to the United States to pursue her dreams of figure skating and Olympic gold, Manley had become a pale ghost of the robust athlete she had once been — she’d lost all her hair, gained 40 pounds and had almost completely stopped talking. “I wanted to wear the pretty dresses and the pretty makeup, but unfortunately sports don’t always come with the pretty stuff,” she told a packed crowd at the University of Ottawa on Monday, 30Read More →