support system

You’ve tried the deep breathing. You’ve gone for walks. You’ve journaled until your hand cramped. And you still feel just as anxious, angry, or overwhelmed as before. When the coping skills that used to work suddenly don’t, it’s easy to feel like you’re failing. But you’re not doing it wrong….

There may come a time when someone with a mental health condition—like depression, anxiety, or PTSD—needs your help. While these conditions require proper treatment from a mental health professional, you can provide meaningful support through comfort, reassurance, and simply being present. When a friend or family member says, “I’m feeling…

Grief is a normal human response to the pain of losing someone. It can be brutal, anguished, disorienting, maddening, enraging, and lonely.  But ultimately, most people will emerge from grief. They may feel forever changed; however, many find meaning in their lives again. Those difficult feelings eventually make way for…

While there are five primary stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — they aren’t linear, and our grief processes are highly personal. Some people aren’t flooded with emotions after a major loss. At least, not at first. Instead, they feel nothing. Read on for more information…

Just as physical health is supported by proper diet, exercise, and rest, our mental health is just as multi-faceted. Mental health consists of our emotional, psychological, and social well-being.  In recognition of the importance of mental health awareness and treatment, World Mental Health Day is celebrated annually on October 10th….

The experience of being pregnant can be transformative for your body, mind, and spirit. Your relationship with your partner might change in anticipation of bringing new life into the world. Your identity may begin to shift as you feel the great responsibility of being a parent. But then, the worst…

Unfortunately, we will all experience grief at some point in life. Loss is universal (whether we like it or not) — but the grief process isn’t. While we might share similar emotions or responses to loss, the journey through our grief is an incredibly individual experience.  That said, there is…

When it comes to the topic of health, physical health tends to be the focus. However, your mental and social health are just as important to your overall health and livelihood, and are even tied to your physical health. Social wellness is a term used to describe the quality level…

Nothing prepares us for the loss of a loved one—whether from death, a divorce, or simply them moving to a new area. The grief that comes with loss is overwhelming. And it doesn’t usually go away quickly.  Months, even years following, you might be asking, “How long does grief last?…

Race and mental illness can be highly stigmatized topics. For many of us, both subjects can often feel too complex or touchy to talk about. But the truth is that mental health and race are intertwined, whether we like to think about them that way or not. This July, Minority…

The idea of brainwashing had a viral moment in the 1950s when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) decided to wage psychological warfare against Communism. Project MKUltra secretly experimented with “mind control” techniques, dosing people with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) without their consent. In fact, at one point the CIA…

Child therapists know that children grieve differently from adults, and they also understand how a child’s unique grieving process might be overlooked in the midst of significant loss. Children who experience the death of someone close to them are often surrounded by adult suffering. They might not want to burden…