A Splintered Mind

New commenting policy in effect. For over ten years I have reached out to this community. I have shared my experiences with you so that you don’t feel alone, and I have tried to comfort commenters to the best of my ability. Although comments are severely down since we have entered the Age of Facebook, I appreciate all the thoughtful, intelligent replies that my readers leave. I am not always neurologically online and able to respond to them in a timely manner, but I do make an effort to reply to everybody. Lately, however, there has been a new breed of commenter. Ever since my article “What To Expect When You Call a Suicide Prevention Hotline” overtook “Depression: Ten Ways to Fight It Off”, Part 1 and Part 2 as my most popular article, there have been lonely, desperate posts left in the comments section. Most of the time they are anonymous. I call them Drive-by Suicide Notes or Death Spam. Imagine you wake up one morning and discover an anonymous...

On Thursday somebody unfriended me over the Charleston shooting. It was early in the day, facts were still rolling in, and the shooter had just barely been arrested. My Facebook friend of years had posted a link to an article that proclaimed Roof was a terrorist. It was an informative article about the church where the shooting took place along with the church’s place in black history, but the article began with one sentence that mentioned the shooting, and only one sentence. It seemed like a cheap link-bait tactic to me. I stated as much in response to the post, and suggested it was too soon to jump to conclusions. I also stated that the shooter had priors with drug possession. My complaint was with the article, not my Facebook friend. Instead of responding to my post, that person unfriended me. It’s their right to do so. We weren’t close by any means. However, I found the reaction intellectually weak, but a popular one all over social media. By midday, America learned more ab...

I recently read a book that really impressed me despite how simplistic it initially seemed. Penguin Random House contacted me to see if I’d like to review How to Be Happy (Or at Least Less Sad): A Creative Workbook by Lee Crutchley. The subject sounded like a great match for my readers here, but when it arrived I was pleasantly surprised to see it was a workbook. I somehow missed that bit in the title, but once I adapted I began to see the great potential being a workbook gave the material. Being told how to think better can be helpful, but being shown how to do it is infinitely better. Instead of empty exercises with an emphasis on touchy feely explorations of feelings & moods as I have seen elsewhere—with the counterproductive affirmation of sadness as a reality—this workbook teaches by emphasizing positive thinking and using clever visuals to downplay negativity. One key aspect of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is training yourself to think about things differently, ...