There are a ton of good stories out there about people’s experiences with psychotherapy, and we want to feature them each week here on the World of Psychology. By shedding more light on the process of therapy, we believe it will make people more comfortable and perhaps get a better understanding of it.

So we’re putting out a call for any and all psychotherapy stories — from therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, clients and patients. If you have a story you want to tell and can do so in under 1,400 words, we’re interested.

We’re not looking (just) for salacious stories. We’re looking for stories that show the personal nature of therapy, and how it can help people.

Read on for details…

Inspiring. Sobering. Entertaining. Touching. Enriching.

This year has been great for brain and behavior videos, with an ever-growing number of lectures and educational videos appearing online, as well as savvy homemade videos in social media. Conversations about mental health are increasingly entering the mainstream, and videos like these spark dialogue, reduce ignorance, assist viewers, and fight stigma. They’re also a great distraction, and a way to relax without feeling guilty about wasting time.

Each of the videos on this list has been chosen as being among the best of its kind made this year, ranging from a contest winner to viral videos to high profile lectures. With so much great work out there, I can’t wait to see more in 2012 (follow Channel N to view what I find).

But first, let’s celebrate 2011 in videos.

Anyone who’s experienced a loved one — whether a family member or friend — who has schizophrenia knows it is often an unpredictable and sometimes-scary relationship. Scary because you’re never quite sure what’s coming next, or how a particular hallucination might manifest itself in the person’s behavior or decisions.

But schizophrenia, like all mental illness, can also be a teacher. Albeit often a hard one.

Dr. Anne Aspler, writing in the Globe and Mail earlier this week, recounts her experiences in what she’s learned in growing up with a mother who suffers from schizophrenia, and the fear she lived in during her early adulthood that she, too, might suffer from this disorder.

More and more people are exposed to psychiatric drugs earlier and earlier in their lives. Some professional associations now say children as young as 4 years old are old enough to start receiving medications — usually with little research demonstrating their long-term safety on a still-developing brain.

With so many people growing up medicated and on psychiatric medications, it seems like a good time to launch a blog that talks about the in’s and out’s of living a life medicated. I’m proud to introduce My Meds, My Self with Kaitlin Bell Barnett.

Kaitlin will discuss the experience of taking psychiatric meds, with a focus on long-term use, as opposed to people new to medication treatment altogether.

“In my experience, there’s lots of information available for people in the latter category to help them adjust to psychiatric drugs, but there’s very little for people who are supposed to be old hands at it.

Dan Fields, a consultant to the Grief Support Services of the Samaritans, recently crafted a beautiful piece that articulates what his dysthymia feels like.

I think his description does a better job of communicating the subtle signs of male depression than any list of symptoms I could throw at you. I have excerpted his profile from the helpful site, Families for Depression Awareness. However, I urge you to follow the link because he explains later in the piece what has worked for him.

I’ve struggled with depression at greater or lesser intensity since my teens. The word “depression” suggests sadness, and this is certainly one aspect of the disorder.

Weather used to make me anxious.

Extremely anxious.

Growing up on the East Coast, I have undergone more blizzards, ice storms, death-defying drives to school, broken tree limbs over roofs, and week-long power outages than I ever really signed up for, and over time, those experiences turned me into a complainer. A loud one.

Every year, as soon as winter touched down, I would begin to pout. And then moan. And then compulsively check the Weather Channel, hoping against hope that maybe the predictions had changed overnight, and those 13 inches of snow would just miss us. I would routinely get sad 24 hours before a big storm, and downright miserable if said storm occurred in the early spring months. I hated everything about winter, but lacking any real reasons to move south, I would just sit it out and let my mood darken for months on end.

At 10 years old you could probably find me sitting on my bed, mesmerized by the latest NSYNC album, while playing the tracks on loop and dancing in front of the mirror. At 15 years old, I’m already immersed in the high school scene, but I’ll be the first to admit that friends and I would go to the local elementary school playground from time to time and ride the swings. At 20 years old, I’m getting closer to graduating college and entering ‘the real world,’ and life keeps on happening. I’m now turning 22, and it’s safe to say that life isn’t as carefree as it once was.

Innocence does get lost along the way, which is a natural consequence of undergoing various experiences that are encountered along the journey — perhaps grief from an illness, family conflict, loss, or a broken heart, just to cite a few of life’s curveballs. Everyone has a story and everyone has a past. Not everyone, however, copes with life’s pain in the same fashion.

Ah, the time of year when political news is everywhere.

The 2012 presidential election looms, and potential candidates travel the country looking for support week after week. It’s a time for thinking about where our country has been and where it should go. It’s a time when people get together and discuss the environment, health care, and unemployment. It’s a time when couples sit down and talk warmly about their hopes for the country and fill envelopes for the party they both are fervent members of.

Sounds sweet, doesn’t it? But I’m not writing about these happily politically aligned people, because they’ll agree with each other that they have no need to read this.

I’m writing about the couples who, when they talk politics, argue, yell, post competing political statements on their lawn, and slam the door on any poor fool who happens to be distributing the ‘wrong’ campaign flyer. If this is you, keep reading. If not, keep reading anyway. You’ll eventually argue with your partner about something, right?

Some people will see anything they want to see in any particular movement or demonstration. Movements like Occupy Wall Street are like a Rorschach Inkblot Test — although it’s just ink on a piece of paper, you can see the future and the past in every blot.

Psychologist and psychoanalyst Todd Essig sees what he wants to see in the movement. When contrasting it with the Tea Party, he idealizes the motivations and focus of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, as though they were all joined together in a common cause (other than the cause to agitate for change, something President Obama actually started more than 4 years ago).

What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is to understand how people who have such a deep understanding of psychology and insight can’t see how they turn such demonstrations into their own personal Rorschach test.

If I Could Go Back is a series of articles that center around the college experience. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes the best advice we could ever give stems from experiences in our past that make us cringe just the tiniest bit.

Someone once told me that every romantic relationship in our lives will fail until one doesn’t. It sounds harsh, and perhaps a little narrow-minded (can we really succeed or fail in love?), but there is truth to it. Most of us, especially those of us under 25, will enter into relationships that will someday end.

There’s something about going through the end of a relationship in college that tends to make everything more intense. Maybe it’s the added stress of keeping up with schoolwork when all you want to do is curl up into a ball or go for a long walk that lasts all day. Maybe it’s the task of telling tons of people who used to know you as “together” that you’re no longer together. Or maybe it’s just because at such a young age, we haven’t had much practice in the art of dealing with a broken heart. Whatever the case, the end of young love (or even young infatuation) is not easy. In fact, it can be downright hellish.

But there are ways to survive it.

And then, grow from it.

If you’re anything like me, you’re easily overwhelmed by spring cleaning, deciding on a new layout for your living room, and organizing your bedroom closet. (Welcome to the wonderful world of anxiety disorders.)

So, when it comes time to up the ante and move to a new house or apartment, the word “overwhelmed,” then, is reduced to a gigantic understatement. Your heart palpitates at the thought of cardboard boxes. You get lightheaded just thinking about all the nooks and crannies that are crammed with your stuff. Your skin gets clammy as you weakly try to formulate a plan of attack.

Instead of trying to do everything at once, break down the process into digestible steps.

“We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world,” wrote Helen Keller.

How I wish she were wrong.

Disappointments leave us with the unpleasant task of squashing, crushing, and pinching lemons to extract any and all juice.

Here, then, are a few of my techniques to turn sour into sweet, to try my best to overcome disappointment.

1. Throw away the evidence

Albert Einstein failed his college entrance exam. Walt Disney was fired from his first media job. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Get it?