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Book Review: My Alien Self: My Journey Back to Me by Amanda Green
I recently finished reading Amanda Green’s My Alien Self: My Journey Back to Me on my Kindle. It is a memoir that begins with the author’s diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and moves on to a journal entry from her teenage years about being raped – a journal entry that she didn’t remember writing about an event that she’d suppressed in her memory. The first half of the book covers the events in her life leading up to the BPD diagnosis and to the development of her alien self. Many of these events are typical of borderline thinking and behaving in the face of painful emotions, depression and dysphoria. She…
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Ask Bon: Why can’t this person listen to reason (or see the truth)?
It has been said in popular culture “if it feels good, do it.” In the case of BPD, the saying should be more like “if I feel it, it must be true.” Emotional reasoning is the inclination to believe that feelings actually equal (or cause) facts and events to happen. The feelings of someone with BPD are so immediate and overpowering; it is difficult for someone experiencing these feelings and emotions to believe that these feelings are self-generated. It is important to remember the function of emotions to understand why emotional reasoning takes place. As stated, the basic emotions function to detect threats to one’s survival (or either body or…
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Author shares daughter’s journal entries during Borderline Personality Disorder treatments
Pat Engebrecht shares her family’s heartbreaking struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder in “When Love is Not Enough The Chronicles of LauraJo”. Author shares daughter’s journal entries during Borderline Personality Disorder treatments By Mel Fabrikant Thursday, August 16, 2012, 03:45 PM EDT Pat Engebrecht shares her family’s heartbreaking struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder in “When Love is Not Enough The Chronicles of LauraJo”. For more than a decade, Pat Engebrecht and her family struggled to understand daughter LauraJo’s diagnosis, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). In “When Love is Not Enough The Chronicles of LauraJo” (ISBN 1461185785), she explains what it was like to be the mother of a young woman with an…
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Bears’ Marshall agrees to weekly TV gig
Through his TV appearances, Marshall also intends to expand the scope of his Project Borderline, a nonprofit organization devoted to raising awareness for borderline personality disorder, a malady that he has been struggling with for several years. Bears’ Marshall agrees to weekly TV gig By Fred Mitchell, Tribune reporter 5:22 p.m. CDT, September 6, 2012 The 2012 Bears are beginning to resemble the 1985 Bears, at least off the field. With quarterback Jay Cutler set to begin doing a weekly radio show starting Monday, his primary receiver Brandon Marshall has signed on to be a regular contributor on for WMAQ-Channel 5. Marshall will appear on the station’s Sports Sunday show,…
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The Economics of Providing Psychotherapy
Mental illness is the leading cause of global disability, accounting for one-third of disability worldwide, according to 2008 data from the World Health Organization. The Economics of Providing Psychotherapy Susan G. Lazar, M.D. Mental illness is the leading cause of global disability, accounting for one-third of disability worldwide, according to 2008 data from the World Health Organization. In the United States, costs of mental illness are 7 percent of total health care expenditures, with the indirect costs substantially higher at 2 percent of U.S. GDP. Over a lifetime, 50 percent of the population will suffer from at least one psychiatric disorder, and each year, nearly 30 percent of adults have…
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Coming back from the darkness
Hello, all. I know I haven’t posted anything here in a while. There is a big reason for this. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to post – I did and do and will post over the next few days and weeks some of the posts I’ve not posted. It’s that my old hosting provider decided to no longer support the configuration that I was using and I couldn’t upgrade to a secure version of the software. They discontinued the product without informing me or giving me a true upgrade path. (Technical note: they didn’t upgrade PHP, which made me unable to upgrade my software. Because of this I…