Category: Mental Health
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MOTW #5: Touched With Fire Starring Katie Holmes
For this weeks Watch this! Movie of the Week, I’m recommending a touching story about the struggle with mental illness and the fight for mental health, Touched With Fire starring Katie Holmes was directed/produced by Pual Dailio. Paul Dalio is the son of world renowned investor and billionaire Ray Dalio. He also directs this movie…
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Halloween, Horror, and PTSD
With Halloween here, I thought it would be fitting to share an experience I had several years back. Back in 2017, I started watching the popular zombie apocalypse show, The Walking Dead. In it’s first episode there’s a scene where a zombie that had been chopped in half is crawling towards the main character, Rick…
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How to Break the Trauma Cycle and Detach from the Pain of the Past
Emotions are energy in motion, and wherever attention goes, energy flows. This is true at the conscious level, but what about at the subconscious level; especially, in situations where the trauma of our past keeps sabotaging the present moment? In this post, we’re going to lay out the transformative process that will allow us to…
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Monday Mirror #4: Personal Reflections that Increase Self-Awareness
“Anything you can’t say thank you for is baggage.” -Joe Demartini For today’s installment of Monday Mirror: Personal Reflections that Increase Self-Awareness, I want us to bring to light some of the residual energy and emotion that most of us suppress in an effort to protect ourselves from future hurt or trauma. In a previous…
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Top 5 Alternative Methods for Treating Depression and Warding Off Mental Illness
When most of us experience depression, our doctor’s rush to prescribe us an anti-depressant (Usually, an SSRI). While antidepressants can be great at helping us when we’re in crisis, it’s important to know that their efficacy tends to wane over time. Many antidepressants also have their fair share of side-effects that make weighing the cost/benefits…
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The Lost Art of Daydreaming: How to Use Your Imagination to Realize Your Dreams
In this post, I want to talk about the lost art of daydreaming and how it can be used to improve our mental health. When we were kids, our imaginations were full of curiousity and creative energy. As we’ve gotten older, our imaginations have become jaded by life and circumstance. When we were younger, our…
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Mental Health & Healing: Happiness as a Habit
For far too many of us, we view happiness as an ellusive emotional state rather than a conscious choice. The positive benefits of inducing and enjoying a happy internal state plays a vital role in maintaining mental health. As someone who has struggled with mental illness for 2 decades now, I’ve learned how to take…
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Monday Mirror #3: Personal Reflections that Increase Self-Awareness
For our 3rd post in the Monday Mirror series, I’d like to share what self-awareness is, why it’s important, and how to cultivate it. In the information age, there’s no shortage of trendy buzz-words that get thrown around without much substance online. Self-awareness is one of those buzz-words that has been over-simplified and made socially…
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The Bedrock of Mental Health: Practicing Good Mental Hygiene
At the foundation of all mental health is our willingness to care for our mind the same way we care for our bodies. Every day we eat, hydrate, sleep, perform personal hygiene, and move around to provide our bodies with what it needs inorder to function. Our minds should be no different, because our mental…
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Bipolar Disorder: Mental Illness or Creative Superpower?
Since resceiving my diagnosis in 2004, It has always been fascinating to me that many eastern cultures view mental illness differently than medical professionals in the western hemisphere. Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia aren’t viewed so much as psychotic breaks as they are spiritual awakenings. In Shamanism, those who struggle with these mental illnesses aren’t considered…
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From Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to INorder in 5 Simple Steps
In a previous post, I shared many resources to help cope with and manage bipolar disorder. At the level of “superpower” in living with and managing any mental illness is self-awareness. Next to acceptance, being self-aware is the most important facet in treating Post Traumatic Stess Disorder (PTSD). This post will be peppered with quotes…
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BOTW #4: The End of Mental Illness by Dr. Amen
For this week’s Read This! Book of the Week, I’m recommending that your read, The End of Mental Illness by Dr. Daniel Amen. In The End of Mental Illness, Dr. Amen draws on the latest findings of neuroscience to challenge an outdated psychiatric paradigm and help readers take control and improve the health of their own brain,…
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My Journey From Bipolar Disorder to Bipolar INorder
I started this blog to help others who struggle with mental illness to have a friend in the fight and ample resources to cope, manage, and heal. With the right resources, it’s possible to go from disorder to INorder.
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Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): 4 Things to Do to Beat the Winter Blues
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is when your mood changes with the seasons. As someone who is bipolar, I usually start to ascend towards mania in spring/summer and descend towards depression in fall/winter. For many years, I didn’t know why this was. I just chalked my mood changes up to not having positive childhood experiences during…
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Emotional Alchemy: Trauma Cannot Be Created or Destroyed, Only Transformed
In my previous post on emotional alchemy, I shared 3 techniques to convert toxic emotions, pain, and trauma into therapeutic offerings that benefit others. I also shared how, at the heart of emotional alchemy is this concept of energy transference. Where we take an emotion, painful memory, or traumatic event and we repurpose it. With…
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10 Mental Health Resources to Prevent Emotional Free-fall and Preserve Your Sanity
As a middle-aged man and Army combat veteran, some of the resources I share on this list have been hard for me to accept/implement. In saying that, the resources that were hardest for me to integrate into my mental health tool-kit have been the most helpful to prevent emotional free-fall and preserve my sanity. Over…
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5150: Being Hospitalized For Homicidal Ideations
In today’s post, I will be sharing one of the scariest experiences I’ve ever had. In the past, I’ve be severely depressed multiple times. So depressed that I struggled with intense suicidal ideations. In relation to what I will be sharing today, being severely depressed was more tolerable than my experience being hospitalized for homicidal…
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My Black Box Experience: I Wanted to Die and Only God Could Stop Me
In this post I will be sharing a personal experience that’s challenging for me to talk about. As I promised in my first post, I will do my best to bring something authentic, transparent, and vulnerable to you. This requires me to share the great, good, bad, and ugly of my experience. In an effort…
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High Functioning Creatives That Have Turned Their Mental Illness Into a Superpower
In today’s post, I’m happy to share some of the high-functioning creatives that have turned their mental illness into superpowers. I’m certain these people will inspire you too!
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QOTD #9: Bleeding On the Ones We Love
Over the years, in dealing with my mental health issues, the ones closest to me have had to ride the emotional rollercoaster with me. Sometimes, in our struggles with mental illness, we can forget that we’re not the only ones affected by it. It’s not that we’re selfish, it’s just that we’ve been in survival…
Daniel Fortune 