SPREADINGTHELOVE

I’m currently working towards my second Master’s degree and I think all of my success in my studies has led some people to think I’m not that sick. However, I’ve experienced several struggles that come with the territory of being a mentally ill student. Participation. The “P” word is probably the most terrifying word for any student with the disorder of or symptoms of social anxiety. If I knew my teacher was the type to call on students at random, I would dread coming to clas

As the first month of the new year has wrapped up, I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come in the past year and how much farther I’d like to go. I want to show people who feel as if nothing will ever get better that it can, as cliche as it always sounds. I also tend to be hard on myself and don’t take the time to appreciate my accomplishments, especially when I compare them to the accomplishments of others. Allowing myself to feel proud is a challenge I’ve been pushing mysel

I was terrified of going on any kind of medication for my mental health. What if it changed my personality too much? What if I lost my ability to be creative? I’ve always felt I have a heightened intuition and though it may sound weird or some people, I was afraid I’d lose that part of myself by going on anxiety medications. I remember watching that teenage horror movie, Prom Night, and developing this idea that anxiety medications make you a zombie when Brittany Snow’s chara

Last week, I walked into my therapist’s office with a smile on my face. “How are you? You’re smiling,” he said to me. My smile crumbled as the tears started to stream down my face. “Smiling to keep from crying,” he then said. I had just received some hateful comments on my articles about abusive relationships from angry men. “You’re the reason why feminism is cancer. Get over it.” “You were abused because you didn’t try to earn respect. You don’t deserve respect if you don’t

Social media has been a blessing a curse for my mental illnesses. On one hand, I can communicate with a large number of people without burdening my social anxiety. I have a place to share my thoughts and opinions when I'm normally too shy to speak up in person. On the other, social media is full of edited perfection and highlight reels. Before social media, you wouldn't see pictures of your ex with another person so easily. You wouldn't know about the promotion someone who yo

Whenever there is a shooting, people decide they want to talk about mental health. I woke up this morning to the news about the shooting in Vegas and read hundreds of comments about how it’s the fault of mentally ill people. The news stories I read didn’t even release the name of the man who committed the horrible crime before people became mental health experts and diagnosed him as depressed. Some people wrote statuses about guns in the hands of “crazy” people and used this

I have Complex-PTSD, a type of PTSD in which the individual has experienced trauma over an extended period of time as opposed to just one traumatic event, like a car accident or shooting. People who have been in abusive relationships, veterans, or those were abused throughout their childhood often have C-PTSD. C-PTSD is tricky to recover from. A former therapist of mine tried Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) but the problem was that the therapy only focused on one inciden

I don’t call myself an optimist but that doesn’t mean I’m a negative individual. I’ve always been a bit turned off by excessive positivity and am less attracted to people who exude hyper-positivity. I know that might strange and like it’s harmful for me to feel that way but overdosing on optimism can be just as detrimental to your well-being as being too negative. Extremes of any sort are never healthy. However, the problem with being too positive isn’t given as much attentio

I was having a discussion with a socially conscious friend about how the mental health community is still so far from equal representation in the media. To The Bone, a Netflix film starring Lily Collins, is a story about a girl struggling with anorexia. The movie is based on a true story and I don’t mean to disrespect the very real struggle the movie represents, however, the story of a cisgender white female struggling with anorexia has already been told and people are more f

Though addiction runs in my family, I never worried too much about it catching up to me. I don’t have the desire to drink when I’m upset and am actually turned off by alcohol when I’m not in a good mood. I’ve never had the desire to smoke or do drugs. I was able to give up sugar and binge-eating fairly easily. I hate casinos and find gambling to be boring. I saw all of those things as being the dangerous addictions that can take over your life. It wasn’t until recently that I