Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
On a more personal level, this creeping reactionary tendency against psychological intervention is starting to get to me. Good therapy and SSRIs have saved my life on two occasions now, and I am unable to function without them due to the severe bouts of OCD which arise when I am unmedicated. Of course, it’s none of my business if this is the specif... See more
how did you realise you were a bad person?
Operating under an illness model of care doesn’t just carry powerful implications for the way we conceptualize perfectionism, it impacts the way we conceptualize every aspect of mental health. The slightest pang of sadness, a drizzle of frustration—we register any decline in positive emotion with an assumption of pathology. It’s a cultural tic. The
... See moreKatherine Morgan Schafler • The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control
In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.
Meghan O'Rourke • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
When I went through medical school and residency in the 1990s, I was taught that people with depression, anxiety, attention deficit, cognitive distortions, sleep problems, and so on have brains that don’t work the way they’re supposed to, just like people with diabetes have a pancreas that doesn’t secrete enough insulin. My job, according to the th
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