Mental Health Topics

Today is National Food Day, and it’s all about helping people “eat real.” It’s a day to take a step back from consuming sugary drinks and packaged foods in favor of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. You know, actual “food.” Not only can eating healthy help you lose weight, it…

Just recently I was watching an old episode of Criminal Minds that was on the TV at my gym. Hotch and his trustee sidekicks were investigating a young boy’s disappearance and trying to put all of the pieces together—but the case ultimately went back to the suspicious parents. By the…

There are several personality disorders that can have a direct and harmful effect on those who suffer with them—a few examples include dependent personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. These mental illnesses are characterized by strange thinking, feeling, and behavioral patterns, which cause individuals marked distress and/or…

There are several sexual disorders that can have a direct and harmful effect on both males and females—a few examples include hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), sexual aversion disorder (SAD), and male or female orgasmic disorders. These disorders are characterized by specific sexual dysfunctions, such as low sex drive, aversion…

  Your locus of control is simply your belief system, it’s what you attribute your experiences, your successes and failures to. Now, you can have either an internal or an external locus of control: individuals with an internal locus of control attribute their successes and failures to their efforts and…

Dreams are weird: they’re these alternative realities that feel freakishly real until we finally realize we’re just dreaming or we wake up. I remember this one week where I had a significantly weird dream just about every night: in just 7 days, I fought anacondas, rode a train into the…

‘Never Eat Soggy Waffles.’ Not a bad piece of advice, but actually not a piece of advice at all—instead, an easy way to remember where North, East, South, and West are on a map. This mnemonic device made first grade a whole lot easier. As did ‘My Very Educated Mother…

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy treatment which focuses on changing one’s negative thinking and/or behavioral patterns that lie behind their difficulties. These may be sleep or relationship difficulties, issues with drug abuse, alcohol dependence, or anxiety and depression. It works by first helping an individual to…

Learning a new language is all fun and games until somebody asks you to speak it. Spanish class, 4th period, every day for three years. We started out with the basics, of course—I learned all of the colors and animals; then we moved on to elementary verbs; and then to…

My niece is practically fluent in Spanish. It started with colors and numbers, which she would impressively recite at family gatherings. But now, a few years later, she can spew out full, complex sentences in Spanish that, of course, none of us adults can understand. And the truth is, I’m…

In movies and TV shows, there’s the classic trope of the bully and the bullied. The bully stuffs his or her victim into lockers, trips them in the hallways, makes fun of their appearance, and laughs at them in front of the whole class—whatever it takes to guarantee utmost embarrassment….

Depression: a crippling illness characterized by fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, and a depressed state that affects 350 million people worldwide. This overwhelming statistic reminds us that any one of us could develop the condition—but not a single one of us hopes to. So we do what we can to prevent…