a peek into the future

I’m probably going to switch to posting longer, higher-quality stuff once a week or so, and post news stories or tidbits the other days of the week.  Attempting to do topics justice while still posting frequently doesn’t go so hot with a full-time job.  (I’m having a lot of fun, though.  Here and at the job.  But not, you know, too much fun.)

Here is a sampling of topics I’d like to write about at some point (not in any order).  If anyone votes for anything, I’ll bump it up in the schedule.  If anyone wants to propose a topic, I’ll drop it in the list as long as it’s vaguely appropriate.

• medication for youth (this has a vote already)
• antipsychotics for youth
• worries about personality and perceptions of self with regards to medication
• relapse rates in bipolar
• kindling
• violence rates/types (both by and against the mentally ill)
• creativity and medication
• firearms (second amendment, deaths by suicide)
• transient mental disorders (like hysterical fugue, that was once popular and is now almost gone)
• more on culture and mental disorders because I ❤ culture
• evolutionary psychology/biology of mental disorders (because I ❤ evolution)
• culture and evolution with regards to mental disorders (because I ❤ the interrelationship of culture and evolution more than almost any academic topic)
• approaches to decreasing stigma and stereotypes
• weird crap I find on the internet
• multiple personality disorder, soulbonds, and theory of mind (i.e., lots of speculation)
• otherkin, and fringe religious beliefs: I don’t believe you’re really an iridescent winged fox like you think you are, but I don’t think you’re mentally ill, either
• these weird things you have to get differentially diagnosed with and that almost no one has (like cycloid psychosis and brief psychotic disorder): what the hell are they?
• inaccuracies in science reporting
• symptom clusters in unipolar depression: withdrawal vs. support-seeking
• Munchausen’s (people faking disorders including mental illness for personal gain)
• dumb things people say – not the standard dumb things like”depression means you’re weak” but new fun wacky stuff
• Is schizoaffective disorder a form of schizophrenia, a form of bipolar, its own thing, or something else?
• spectrum disorders, public perception, and identity politics
• other identity politics stuff
• legal stuff (I don’t know enough about this yet to break it down into subcategories)

welcome!

I went out on the Internet and looked for blogs with up-do-date reports on research and news, with analysis of relevant issues to mental illness and mental health. I’d spent several years in online patient communities, where I had picked up most of the available knowledge, and wanted more and newer.

I easily found impassioned anti-pharmaceutical-companies blogs and anti-psychiatry blogs. Many of their conclusions were heavily colored with anger toward pharmaceutical companies and toward psychiatry, as with the argument that because a medication was developed for one purpose, it be restricted only to that purpose (the medication he was referring to is effective for other problems as well, and restricting it to its original purpose would result in withdrawing effective treatment from current patients).

I was familiar with McManWeb, and ran into John McManamy’s blog, which is (unsurprisingly) quite good. But I found nothing else either of that quality and depth, or covering things from a similar pro-mental-health slant. I was also surprised, and disheartened, to see how many blogs were antithetical to medical treatment of mental illness, and so antithetical to the mental health of the population they are advocating for.

I am looking forward to finding more high-quality pro-mental-health blogs. Meanwhile, I am starting this blog to further spread high-quality (or as high-quality as my schedule allows) mental health and mental illness news, science, and commentary.