About These Blogs

Welcome to "Beyond Mental Illness." This site was created to give advice to people who have a psychiatric history and now are working to re-build their lives. It is definitely possible for people with psychiatric histories to have meaningful lives with important contributions, and these pages are designed to give suggestions on how to do so.

There is minimal discussion of medication here. Medications can be an important step for some people, but they are only one step. Medications can help mitigate some symptoms, but they cannot do everything a person needs. The author hopes to give suggestions on filling other needs people with mental illness have.

Right now the blog has two composite characters. One is Tony, a young man who has recently been released from the hospital and is low-functioning. The letters addressed to Tony are here on this page.

The second character is Kayla, who has been stable for a while but needs advice on taking next steps and moving forward. The link to Kayla's letters is: beyondmikayla.blogspot.com.

The author recommends people interested in mental health consider reading the following books: http://beyondmentalillness.blogspot.com/p/recommended-reading-list.html.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Questions

Dear Readers,

Thank you very much for joining me here. I hope you have found the blog helpful and informative.
I would appreciate hearing your thoughts about the blog. Please e-mail me at arioseo@gmail.com and answer the following questions:

1. What is your favorite post thus far? What is your least favorite post? (This can apply to both Tony and Kayla's letters.)

2. Which topics would you like to see addressed?

Thank you again,

Ariose

Friday, June 14, 2013

Building

Dear Tony,

I want to remind you that you need to go one step at a time.

I have come a long way since I was hospitalized. But I needed to do it piece by piece. If I tried to go too far, I would crumble. Recovering from mental illness is about a million small steps. In my expeience, there are very few big steps.

I think of it as building a foundation. When you are building anything, literally or figuratively, you build one brick, one nail, one small piece bit by bit.

You can do impressive things, but you need to do them a little at a time.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Starting

Dear Tony,

Starting anything is generally the most difficult part.

Once you have figured out what to do, start as soon as you feasibly can. If you are having nagging feelings that something is off than you need to pay attention to that. That is a legitimate reason to postpone starting. On the other hand, if you honestly believe this step is the next step, and you are just nervous, then you should start as soon as you can work yourself up to it. Postponing things usually does not help and can make the anxiety worse. Many times I have needed to start things just because the difficulty of taking that step was still better than continuing to live with my anxiety about it. I have learned to start things as soon as I can. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.

You need to decide what you need in place before you can start something. It might be a certain time or access to specific books or other materials of an infinite variety of other factors. No one else can tell you what you need - it is specific to you. It is not reasonable.

Even today, when I start a new skill - even reading a new book - I burn out very quickly the first time I try. I often can only do the exercise for about 10-15 minutes, and then I can't focus. My brain needs to rest and adapt to this new skill on its own. Once I grow used to it I can do it for longer periods of time.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Steps Towards Healing from Trauma

Dear Tony,

Major interventions such as healing from past trauma come in parts. You need to work on it for a while, make some improvements, then leave it and go work on something else. Think of a medical condition which requires multiple surgeries to fix. You prepare yourself and go to one surgery, heal and recover from that, then try to live your life to the fullest capacity until you are ready for the next surgery. Each surgery is legitimate, and you grow better after each one. But you can't do it all at once.

I needed to be out of the hospital for a while before I started to work on my trauma. When you decide to try to heal from trauma, that is what you are working on. That is the one skill you are working to build at the time. That is the primary reason why I waited: I felt I was better off improving my immediate life for a while. But that is just me.

Start with what is bothering you now. There may indeed be root causes or traumas which caused other traumas, but you still need to start with the most obvious and pressing issues. (One of the reasons why you will probably need to revisit trauma multiple times - you will develop a better understanding of the root causes are you are trying to heal. This cannot happen quickly.) The memories you work on should be based on how much it bothers you now - not how much it bothered you at the time or how much it does or does not bother other people.

Do what you can do, not what you need. Work on the feelings you can handle, deal with them, and let them go. Often, if I start to work on it, I can cut part of the troublesome feelings out pretty quickly. I generally felt like I could take off about 20% of my negative feelings by focusing on them this way.

Then I had to put it aside and go back to more immediate interventions. While I was doing that I gained more understanding of the causes of these traumas and what the next steps were. But I still needed to revisit it multiple times after that.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Sleep

Dear Tony,

As you have probably guessed, sleep is extremely important. Psychiatric problems can be intensified by sleeping difficulties; I think sleeping troubles might actually cause some mental health problems. All of my most serious mental crises either were preceded by or included substantial insomnia.

In order to stay healthy, I have learned to pay close attention to my sleeping and figure out when things are going badly astray. Everyone has nights when they do not sleep well, but trouble arises when you cannot sleep night after night.

If you are having trouble sleeping, try to relax. Being anxious about your sleeping can feed on itself and make the problem worse. You become worried about going through the next day without sleep and that worry keeps you awake. Tell yourself that you can do it, that you can make it through the next day even if you don't sleep well. You have functioned fine without enough sleep several times in the past. You can do it again if you need to.

For me, the main reason I cannot sleep is anxiety. Often it is a sign that there is a problem I am ignoring and need to address. Once I identify the problem I start to figure out precisely what I can do immediatley to address it and promise myself I will take those steps the next day. I tell myself that over and over again. Sometimes I need to address the problem immediately in the middle of the night. But most of the time it is enough to make a concrete plan about what you will do. For longer-term problems, try to think of something small you can do to address the situation. If you have honestly done everything you can that is helpful, tell yourself that over and over again. Other times I can't sleep because I am hungry and not aware of it. If so, just eat something. Try not to go overboard, but your need to sleep is more important than your diet.

Finally, if you start to have major problems sleeping, put these techniques into practice as much as you can and try to sleep as much as you can. As much as possible don't worry about when you sleep. Chances are you are run down or stressed and need the extra sleep. Just sleep whenever you can.