Let’s talk!

Today is Bell Let’s Talk day. The campaign urges us to talk about mental illness with the goal of improving the lot of individuals with mental illness. The reason’s are simple:

Bell Let's Talk spokesperson, Michel Mpambara, president of the Douglas Institute Foundation, Jane Lalonde, and yours truly at an event announcing Bell's major donation to the Douglas Brain Bank.

- One in five of us will suffer from a mental illness at some point in our lives. This of course doesn’t mean we will be completely debilitated (like physical illness, some stop us in our tracks while others are more...

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Posted on 08 Feb 2012
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Run, Forrest, Run

Should we listen to our emotions? Most people tend to say Yes. “Listen to your emotions, they are telling you something.” But does this really make sense?

The fact is, emotions are a basic aspect of human nature. They are neither good nor bad, they just are. It’s sort of like eating. Don’t do enough and you die, but do too much and you die as well. Emotions act the same way as hunger, they are necessary to our survival, but they are not always our allies.

Most people who struggle with life have a tendency to have overactive emotions. Fear and guilt are two good examples. While there are...

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Posted on 31 Jan 2012
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Why am I always attracted to abusive alcoholics?

Intriguing title for this blog post, don’t you think? Well it is an actual question I have been asked more than once in my career.

It certainly does make you wonder. It’s not as if on a first date, we would typically ask something like, “Are you the kind of person that will make my life a living hell?” And when they say, “Count on it,” we happily give out our phone number!

There must be something about the filter that is lacking when we are seeking a relationship. Of course we can’t read minds and we will sometimes find ourselves in bad relationships. It happens and it can’t always be...

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Posted on 17 Jan 2012
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This year I resolve never to write about resolutions

I can count on three media requests each year. In the summer, I will get a request to comment on the importance of summer vacations. During the holidays, the pre-Christmas request is to discuss loneliness and/or stress. This is soon followed by the standard “Hey, why don’t you write about resolutions?”

Well, as Weird Al Yankovic once said so eloquently, “I’d rather rip out my intestines with a fork.”

OK, OK, perhaps I am not so averse to the idea. Several years ago, I decided to advise people on how to break New Year’s resolutions and was lucky enough to have it published in the Montreal...

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Posted on 03 Jan 2012
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The Rudolf in all of us

Perhaps I should get a life but I really hate the sentiment behind the song Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. “Hey, let’s make fun of the funny-looking kid until he becomes useful to us.”

Nevertheless, I will try to take it in the light spirit it was intended and see if a reindeer’s life can be as illustrative of human nature as other animals have in the past: (chipmunks, goldfish, and squirrels (please scroll down)).

Here is yesterday’s Rudolf-inspired column: (Voir plus bas pour la version Française)

Reindeer psychology (Source: La psychologie du renne. Journal Métro, December 13,...

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Posted on 14 Dec 2011
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Genes trump Dad. So does Facebook.

If you have more than one child, or if you have siblings, you will be struck by how different they are. Same basic genetic make-up, radically different personalities.

While siblings can be remarkably similar in many ways, just a few subtle differences – a little more of this trait, a little less of that one – can have a huge impact. Now imagine my family. My four children are all adopted. If we plotted their characters on a canvas, they would be drawn on the farthest corners.

What this has taught me over the years is that: A) our innate temperaments account for much (probably most) of our...

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Posted on 29 Nov 2011
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The new hypochondriac

Most anxious people have pretty well been like that most of their lives. Their anxiety may get better or worse but, for the most part, they always consider themselves anxious people.

But in a small number of cases, a debilitating anxiety disorder seems to come out of the blue. These people seem to have functioned very well for most of their lives until a relatively minor event throws them into a state where they are overwhelmed with fears and obsessions. In the column I published last week, I tell the story of two fictional people. Joe represents just this type of person, one I see from...

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Posted on 23 Nov 2011
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The Yes Man

Stress can be loosely defined as any challenge. The body’s stress response is the alarm that signals a need to act on the challenge. The greater the challenge, the greater the stress. This also implies that a confident person or a person with great skill will feel less stress when facing the same challenge. But if there is no limit to the challenges coming in, regardless of the amount of skill, a person will inevitably burn out.

In my November 1st column, I told the story of a burnout case. The client was so good at pleasing others that the requests kept coming in fast and furious. Most...

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Posted on 15 Nov 2011
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Let’s be friends…or not

One of the funniest lines from Seinfeld was when Jerry asks; How do you break up with a friend? You can’t say ‘let’s be friends.’ In fact, when you don’t want to be friends at all, what do you say? ‘Let’s just BE?’

The famous (or infamous) line, ‘let’s be friends,’ used in break-ups is a stab in the heart that usually means, ‘I don’t want to ever see you again.’ While this may be an exaggeration, it isn’t completely off base. This is because the prospect of maintaining a ‘friendship’ after a love relationship is very daunting to say the least.

I wrote about the subject in my column two...

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Posted on 31 Oct 2011
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Secret shame

Yesterday I took part in a walk for mental illness. It was good to see a decent (but not great) turnout of about one or two thousand people by my estimate. Although a good number of media outlets were there, I saw no coverage of it on the news I watched. Three other walks and the Occupy Wall Street protest seemed to garner the lion’s share of coverage. I guess this is the reality of something as decidedly unglamorous as mental illness.

Schizophrenia, which is a relatively rare mental illness, affects 60 times more people than Muscular Dystrophy, five times as many as Multiple Sclerosis,...

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Posted on 17 Oct 2011
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