“I grew up in an expressive, thoughtful household. I was always interested in creativity and thinking. But as I entered my teens, I started smoking pot. I had found excitement in learning until sophomore year of high school, when I became reserved and felt as though existence was meaningless. Everything was grey…
“At the age of 33, I was running education programs at Harvard Business School (HBS), married, and mother of a new baby daughter. Shortly after I gave up nursing my daughter, I began to feel that my house and HBS were under electronic surveillance so I asked the Dean to bring in the police to investigate…
A Certified Peer Specialist (CPS) is a person who has experienced mental health issues, trauma and/or substance-use issues and has been through training designed to enable them to help others through similar situations. CPSs hold a unique role in the field of Mental Health Care. They provide emotional support, advocacy, and share community resources from the perspective of someone who identifies as having first-hand lived experience of recovery…
The availability of peer support services has skyrocketed in recent years and is expected to continue to grow, in part from a focused and determined peer advocacy movement. While many peers and service users attest to the benefits of peer support services in enhancing recovery and wellness, the research literature is dominated by mixed reports about the effectiveness of peer support services. However, we argue this should not be taken as evidence that peer support services are not effective for several reasons which we outline below…
“Recovery” is one of those tricky words in mental health. It carries a generally positive connotation to some, but not all, and means different things to different people. Some equate recovery with being “cured,” returning to a former state of wellness, or as synonymous with no longer needing psychiatric medications. Others conceptualize recovery as the development of self-acceptance, meaning and purpose in the face of adversity. In this opinion piece, I examine my own use of the term recovery…
Persons with mental health challenges, such as psychosis, often experience difficulties with cognition including attention, memory, and learning. Cognition has not generally improved with medications or therapy, which suggests the need for novel strategies to improve these aspects of functioning…
It was previously thought that persons with mental health challenges, such as schizophrenia, experience less happiness relating to social interactions with others. However, current research has begun to question this claim…
Should the quality of one’s cancer care be worse if a person is diagnosed with schizophrenia (or any mental health condition for that matter) compared to people who are not diagnosed with this mental illness? Of course, it should not. This month I came across an article on rates of breast cancer screening in women with schizophrenia (1). In this meta-analysis (this is a way of combining studies to look at large samples) that included over 25,000 women…
Individuals with mental health challenges face barriers to participate fully within their communities, which may include recovery communities (e.g., recovery learning centers, clubhouses) as well as the larger community (e.g., work/school, church/temple, social clubs). There is need for researchers to better understand factors that facilitate and those that impede community participation…
