Hi Folks, Salut Come join me this Sunday at Montreal Walks for Mental Health Venez me rejoindre ce dimanche à Montréal Marche Pour La Santé Mentale ________________________________________________________ Speaking of mental illness here is an article on the topic of stigma: THANK YOU, HOWIE MANDEL! What’s the big deal with shaking someone’s hand? Well for someone [...]
Tag Archives: stigma
Bell Let’s Talk: Part 2
For last year’s Bell Let’s Talk Day I listed some reasons why we should be more open about our mental health struggles. But what happens when we do open up and seek treatment? (Published Jan 25, 2017 in the Huffington Post) Here is just a partial list of some of the biggest issues we might [...]
200 and counting. I’m still big in Bulgaria!
In today’s Journal Métro is my 200th column. I started in September 2005 and this blog started a couple of years after that. My blog posts are mostly elaborated versions of what I put in my column with a few assorted random postings thrown in. Every other week I scratch my head wondering what I’m [...]
They’re not like us: Stigma, mental illness and groupthink
It is mental illness awareness week. You may have noticed that I don’t often focus directly on mental illnesses per se. I prefer to focus on our general human nature. The greatest compliment I get is when someone says, “Hey, you wrote about me today!” This is because I try to show how character traits and [...]
Speaking of idiots
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. – William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) The same goes for words used to describe mental illness, does it not? The meaning of a word depends on what it represents not on the word itself. In my column [...]
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: – One in five of us will suffer from a mental illness at some point in our lives. This of course doesn’t mean we [...]
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 [...]
I’ll trade you that needle for a bus ticket
In my last post I wrote about stigma by discussing how two similar experiences can be lived in radically different fashions. I used the example of losing a loved one. Because we live our lives through our subjective lenses it is easy to label someone as weak when they handle something less well than us. [...]
What’s HIS problem? I’ve gone through worse.
Many factors contribute to stigma in mental illnesses but an important one involves assumptions made when two people experience the same circumstances. It is natural to assume that if we both stub our toes, we will experience similar pain, or if we both lose our jobs we will both have the same reaction. In reality, [...]
It’s all in your brain
The Douglas Institute recently released a video designed to spark interest and debate about mental health and to encourage people to consult our website, which is a rich source of up-to-date and scientilically validated information on a wide variety of mental health topics. The video was designed to grab people’s attention and in this respect [...]
