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The Impact of Boxing on Mental Health: Improving Resilience in Life (A Guest Post by Richard Sison)

Mental health is a critical aspect of overall health and well-being. With the rise of stress and anxiety in today’s fast-paced society, finding ways to improve and maintain mental resilience is becoming increasingly important.  Boxing is a high-intensity physical activity that has been shown to positively impact mental health, including reducing stress and anxiety, improving mood, and increasing self-esteem and confidence.  In […]

Healing from Trauma takes Work

As a former facilitator for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Connection Recovery Support Group, I began each meeting by reading a list of objectives provided by NAMI. One of the objectives states: Understand that mental health conditions are no one’s fault and can be traumatic experiences. To be clear, not everyone who lives with mental illness has experienced […]

Sadness or Depression?

I began writing this post on March 5, 2022. That was over a year ago, y’all! I didn’t get far. Besides the title, all I had written at that time was this: It’s time to start tracking my moods again. I stopped because day-to-day was the same thing, so it seemed pointless. Now, there’s been a shift in my emotional […]

Should You Get a Second Medical Opinion?

My thought on getting a second medical opinion is that it doesn’t hurt to get one if you have any qualms about what your provider is advising you to do or not to do. Even if you don’t have any qualms about what your provider is telling you, it still wouldn’t hurt – if that’s what you choose to do […]

Consider a Mental Health Power of Attorney

Imagine that you have just had a health emergency that has rendered you incapable of making medical decisions for yourself that you would otherwise be able to make. For situations like this, you (i.e., the principal) can get a type of advance directive called a power of attorney (POA), which would legally authorize another person (i.e., the agent) of your […]

Keeping Your Mental Health Crisis Plan Up to Date

Sometimes you don’t know you need a crisis plan until you do. Or until someone who cares about your well-being does some homework and encourages you to write one. My then boyfriend (now husband) encouraged me to create a document called a crisis plan that would help him help me if I ever had another mental health crisis like the […]

Bipolar Disorder as a “Silent Killer”

It was not until the end of my 36th week of pregnancy that I was diagnosed with gestational, or pregnancy-induced, hypertension. To my knowledge, I had never had any issues with my blood pressure prior to the late third trimester of my pregnancy. I did not even know that my blood pressure was high – who knows for how long […]

What’s Your Diagnosis?

In my last blog post, “Am I a Fraud?“, I discussed imposter syndrome and whether I am bipolar at all. My former psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner considered me so stable that she said I did not need to come back for another appointment for six months unless, of course, I felt there was a need to see her sooner. […]

Am I a Fraud?

At my most recent mental health appointment last month, my psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner (PMHNP) asked me her routine questions in order to gain insight about my mental state: Am I depressed, am I manic, am I stable? Ever since I began seeing her – which has been some months now – my moods have been stable. One could […]

From Pain to Passion: Living MY Best Life

Grief is not just the deep sorrow and mourning that overcomes a person when he or she loses a loved one to death or a failed relationship. One can also grieve someone or something that he or she has never had. Maybe it’s a parent you’ve never met or the dream college to which you applied but were never accepted. […]