Imperfect Cognitions

In this post Linda Gask presents Finding True North: The healing power of place, a book published in April 2021 by Sandstone Press.  What does it mean to ‘recover’ from depression? The answer you receive to this question will vary by the profession, training, experience, and ideological stance of the person you ask. Some will speak in terms of a reduction in the number of symptoms of depression you have ticked ‘yes’ to. Others will focus on regaining ability to function in the world, particularly in your relationships and ability to work. How do you ‘recover’? Is it simply about taking the tablets, going to therapy- or both? Or is there more to it?  What about mindfulness, and exercise, and all the other suggestions people helpfully provide? There will also be a few who will admonish you for your choice of words to describe a shade of normal human unhappiness and add to the guilt you were feeling for being depressed in the first place. Personally, I’ve found the writing of D...

Mattias Strand  is Consultant Psychiatrist at the  Stockholm Centre for Eating Disorders . He is also a PhD student at  Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm , where his main research focus is on self‐admission as a potential tool in the treatment of severe eating disorders.  In this post, he discusses the background to, and main claims of, a recent paper, co-authored with  Manne Sjöstrand , Senior Researcher at the  Stockholm Centre for Healthcare Ethics  at Karolinska Institutet, " Self‐admission in psychiatry: The ethics ". In recent years, self-admission to inpatient treatment has become an increasingly popular treatment tool in psychiatry in the Scandinavian countries as well as in the Netherlands. In self-admission, patients who are well known to a service and who have a history of high utilization of inpatient treatment are invited to decide for themselves when a brief admission episode – usually 3-7 days at a time – is warranted. Patien...

Today's post is by Polly Mertens (pictured below) who talks about her experience with bulimia, and her recovery. Polly's website is Get Busy Thriving . I started binging and purging when I was 14 after I had been restricting food to lose weight. I felt like I was missing out on foods I enjoyed. When I tried to stop my binging and purging cycles a year later, I couldn’t control the urges. I later learned I had bulimia. Over the next 20 years I could manage stopping the binging for a few weeks or months, but the urges always came back and I felt helpless to stop them. At my worst I would binge and purge 10 times a day. On the outside I seemed like a healthy and normal person. I went to the gym, ate pretty healthy and had an average body weight. With friends I only ate normally, but alone I was completely out of control around food. I felt ashamed and extremely frustrated with my addiction. Bulimia is a hidden habit and most people wouldn’t know someone was bulimi...

This week Emily T. Troscianko , Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities , and member of the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty at the University of Oxford, writes about anorexia for our series of accounts by experts-by-experience. Emily (pictured above) also contributes to Psychology Today with a blog called A Hunger Artist . If there’s any mental illness that offers the sufferer an illusion of having it all, it’s anorexia. The twin towers of that disingenuous promise are thinness and control, bedfellows familiar from pop psychology and the diet industry. No other mental illness gets under observers’ skins (incomprehension, fear, anger, envy) quite like anorexia, and that’s because none other is quite so physical. And it’s in the interplay between the mental and the physical that the hollowness of anorexia’s illusions gets exposed. In the early days, the heady ‘hunger high’ gets you hooked, the admiring comments about your weight loss keep ...

As part of our posts written by people with lived experience of mental health issues, Amy writes about anxiety. Amy has a blog , and you can follow her on Twitter . For the past three years I have experienced severe and anxiety and depression, resulting in numerous counselling sessions and medication. It’s a long journey of recovery, but I feel I am finally getting to the other side. I feel it important to battle the stigma surrounding mental health and thus why I have created my own mental health blog, Relief from Anxiety , and why I am writing about it in this blog post. Anxiety symptoms can be varied from person to person, including loss of appetite, shortness of breath, palpitations, dizziness, and irrational thoughts. Generally, these kind of actions and thoughts occur during a panic attack, when the flight or fight system kicks in, which originates from our caveman days. It helps to either run or fight the situation. Each panic attack is different from others, and there are...