Category Archives: Anxiety

Glenn Close is doing her part to help end the stigma around mental illness.

To help further initiate conversation and educate people about mental health, Close, 68, has joined Mashable’s#MindfulAllies campaign, which tells real stories about real people dealing with mental illness.

As part of the campaign, Close, a longtime advocate for ending the negative stigma attached to mental illness, penned an emotional letter in which she opened up about her family’s battle with mental illness.G

I am a psychiatrist, and I have experienced recurrent severe major depression for most of my adult life. My problems first appeared during adolescence when I began to suffer from anxiety. I experienced my first episode of significantly low mood in my last year of medical school. Nevertheless, I decided to go ahead and train in psychiatry, as it was clear to me this was the specialty that I showed the most talent for as a student. I had a further episode of depression during my training when I failed a professional examination. – See more at: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/depression/im-psychiatrist-i-live-depression#sthash.Da16BPRz.dpuf

Julie Barton was sitting on the couch one day with her head in her hands, utterly defeated by the severe depression that filled her with sadness and self-loathing, when she felt an unexpected warmth in her toes. Her fluffy red golden retriever puppy, Bunker, was sitting on her feet

NEARLY 20 years ago, I was a social worker in a county jail where I first began to understand just how frequently the police deal with people with mental illnesses. Run-ins with the police were a regular occurrence for many of my clients, with officers often knowing them by name. They were overwhelmingly poor, and poor people with mental illnesses are also likely to experience homelessness andsubstance abuse — issues that place them at increased risk of police contact and incarceration.

“Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in 1999, in the New Yorker piece that would lead to his magnum opus Kitchen Confidential. He proclaimed the professional kitchen “the last true refuge of the misfit,” and while many would argue that still holds true nearly two decades later, even now there pervades an unfortunate double standard in which the sort of so-called dysfunction that often drives people toward cooking as a profession is still too heavily stigmatized to talk about.

When I fall prey to the black dog, it’s easy to tell. My depression manifests in baking: jars filled with rapidly aging cookies, racks of untouched cupcakes, freezers glutted with brownies. Typically I find baking soothing, but there’s nothing soothing about this frenzy of activity. It’s a Hail Mary attempt to wrest a little accomplishment from life, the last of my energy reserves wasted on food whose presence, whether it’s a success or failure, becomes another reproach. Baking is about the triumph of precision over creativity, but in these moments my approach is slapdash and the results uneven. If cooking can be a means of nourishing and communing, this is the opposite, a sort of gingerbread fortress of solitude.

If someone suddenly collapsed and appeared to be having a heart attack, you wouldn’t just walk on by, right? You’d at least call 911. You’d likely stay with the person while the ambulance was coming. And if you were trained, you might even start CPR. Chances are that human decency would motivate you to do something.