Description: When we look back on the year or two (or whatever it finally turns out to be) of the Covid-19 pandemic what do you think we will find happened to the suicide rate during the pandemic? If the rate increased significantly why might that have occurred? What factors were (are) involved? The study of… Read more »
Posts Categorized: mental illness
Personality Disorders in 3 Simple Questions
Description: You may not know, off the top of your head, what the diagnostic criteria are for the 10 Personality Disorder (PD) types split over three clusters in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5). Given the word “personality” in their category title, you might expect that they would be defined by the patterns they reflect… Read more »
Into Post-Pandemic with Telehealth and Teletherapy
Description: Think back to one year ago, call that point in time up and try and remember what you thought about everything then. OK a big ask but one year ago would you have even thought about the possibility of accessing therapy services by phone or via video chat (I would bet you had not… Read more »
What is Your Brain For? Maybe NOT for Thinking!
Description: When you experience a flair of stress or anxiety what is your first thought? I suspect it is some version of “What is going on in my world that is stressful or challenging”. Especially these days with a raging pandemic, that is not a bad first thought as it can lead to problem focused… Read more »
Your Brain on Dissociation
Description: What does dissociation involve? At its “simplest” level, it an involve a sort of out of body experience sometimes described as being out of the pilot chair of your body or consciousness and watching things happening to you from a third-party perspective. More complex forms of dissociation include amnesia (often related to trauma), identity… Read more »
Psychology of COVID-19– Suicide Prevention
Description: September is Suicide prevention awareness month in both Canada and the United States. Suicide rates have risen in the United States through the current year and seem to be and are projected to increase in Canada as well. The additional burdens of social, economic, employment, isolation, stress and uncertainty arising from factors associated with… Read more »
The Psychology of Covid-19: Depression or Boredom?
Description: Think about this distinction for a moment in relation to your own experiences within and related to our time with the Covid-19 pandemic. How much of our negative emotional, social and cognitive experiences could or should we attribute to bad things that have happened to us (e.g., health challenges, job losses, life disruptions) and… Read more »
Psychology and Covid-19: Self-Care is Vital
Description: Most of us have been spending a LOT of time in the past couple of months looking outward, using television and online media, at the world around us and at how the other people in it have (or have not been) coping with the impacts associated with Covid-19. We are also starting to see… Read more »
Psychology and Covid-19: When We Did Not Know We Had the Rugs That Were Yanked
Description: I am sure you have heard the phrase “having the rug pulled out from under you,” before. Interpreted literally, it obviously means having the very thing you are standing on violently shifted from under you, typically with catastrophic results. The “magic” act of whipping a table clothe out from under a fully set table… Read more »
Psychology and Covid-19: Stress and Disorder (Depression)
Description: We (well, the media) have largely been discussing the Covid-19 pandemic is terms of physical demands and consequences and while that makes sense given that its origins are viral (literally not virtually). One of the consequences of this focus is that, even in countries with socialized medicine programs (e.g., Canada), when we mobilize the… Read more »
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