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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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. […]
Because I have a sister, I’ll always have a friend. -My sister I grew up the only girl, the middle of three children. But 2021 rocked my world in a number of ways. One which I will discuss here: At 30 years old, I went from the only girl to the baby girl, number 4 out of 5 children. I’ve […]
