I remember sitting in my apartment one night and getting a call from a good friend of mine. He was ready to take his life, but ultimately he didn’t. At least not that night. It would be about another six years before he completed suicide. June is men’s health month, and that includes men’s mental health, which is largely overlooked. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Abilify is an anti-psychotic drug that I began taking when I was hospitalized for brief psychotic disorder. It was a while before abilify “worked” for me. I struggled to adjust in ways that I had not attributed to the medication at the time, only in hindsight. Not to mention I was adjusting to new medication and simultaneously studying public policy […]
Everybody deals with anxiety and depression; however, some people have a difficult time in managing it. As a result, here is a brief list of techniques that a person can use to help manage their most persistent fears and every day anxieties. When facing a current or upcoming task that overwhelms you with a lot of anxiety, the first thing […]
A few days ago i was shocked that someone would drop the suicide hotline number in reply to me, but hey, they don’t know me from Adam as my mom used to say. I didn’t stop to think that expressing I could relate to someone’s need to isolate could be taken as a cryptic cry for help. Well, isolation is […]
Yesterday, I asked the groomer to give my toy poodle a low hair cut. She got the cut all right, and all the hair on her tail was gone too. That’s not cool. My lil’ girl Princess looked at me and looked at her tail as if to say, “What the heck did you let them do to me?” I […]
Growing up, grief was an emotion that was hardly ever expressed by anyone other than myself. For instance, when my uncle committed suicide when I was ten years old, I never saw my dad show any emotion around me, but that is part of being a man. I knew that my uncle and father were close though. My uncle turned […]
