Mental Health Month: 9 Myths About Mental Illness & Therapy
Even in today’s advanced world, there’s still much misunderstanding and stigma surrounding mental illness. Many of us are quick to dismiss people with mental illness as inferior or less than or wonder why they can’t just snap out of it.
Many of us also rarely believe that mental illness merits the same understanding and compassion as medical illnesses such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease.
Such stigma has devastating effects. It “prevents some people from accessing support and professional help and breeds shame and secrecy, which can significantly worsen a person’s condition as well as their prognosis — even to a point of being life-threatening, in the case of suicidal ideation,” according to Joyce Marter, LCPC, a psychotherapist and owner of Urban Balance, a multi-site counseling practice in the greater Chicago area.
That’s why it’s so important to talk about the facts. Below, experts share accurate information about mental illness.


There are few things in life as stressful as a failing relationship. When two people are fighting, feeling distant, and struggling to understand each another, they often turn to couples counseling to help strengthen and rebuild their bond.
It would be hard to open a popular magazine or psychology journal these days without finding some reference to a new advance in positive psychology.
Finding the right therapist is difficult. In the last 12 years, I’ve been through half a dozen of them. I have no doubt that most of these therapists would blame me for these high turnover rates. They would say I have some sort of inability to communicate my needs or that I’m not ready to move forward.
The other week, my 5-year-old daughter broke her arm at the elbow. It was a serious break which required a call to 911, an ambulance ride, surgery, and an overnight stay at the hospital.
“When you have bipolar disorder, it can often feel like you’re at the mercy of your emotional states — like you’re the passenger in the car, just along for the ride,” writes
Hypothyroidism — known as low thyroid — may cause depression. Hypothyroidism is a “condition in which the body does not get enough thyroid hormone for optimal brain and body functioning,” according to
Money may not buy you love. But in the 19th century, if you were well off, it could snag you a “home-away-from-home” private hospital. These rich-only places were a far cry from the overcrowded and filthy public asylums of the day, according to
I applaud the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) decision last week to increase its mental health staffing in facilities by nearly 10 percent across the board, adding up to 1,600 new clinicians — psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and more. (My sources within the VA indicate most of these positions will be LPC and Master’s level clinicians — not psychologists or psychiatrists.)
It’s common to have some concerns and worries about being pregnant, having a healthy child, giving birth, and parenting your little one, according to Pamela S. Wiegartz, Ph.D, and Kevin L. Gyoerkoe, PsyD, in their book,
This isn’t the blog post I planned to write. I might get to that one eventually; it’s still kicking around in my head and I still know what I want to say. But this one — I needed to make a couple of stops on the way home, and I didn’t, because I had to race back to the laptop. The words kept wanting out. When you’re a writer, that’s how you know you’re on to something.
After a decade old legal battle, the Judge Rotenberg Center lost its effort to bar the public from viewing how “treatment” is administered at the facility. In this troubling, emotional video, we see then 18-year-old Andre McCollins repeatedly shocked 31 times. His crime? Failure to remove his jacket in a timely manner.