Quote

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

- Elie Wiesel
Wikipedia Link

A Comedy Break

Jeremy Hotz Official Website

Blogging Basics

Now right off the bat the majority of my internet endeavors tend to crash and burn but over the last six months I seem to have learned a few things.

1. Content is key - The more content you have the better off you will be. In the last month or so traffic coming in from search engines has really taken off plus if someone actually finds your blog it would be nice if they stuck around for a while.

2. Entrecard is pretty darn reliable - Now they are having a movement where all of the so called power dropping pages are going to be purged from the system (basically a long list of fast loading pages). I am an inbox dropper for the most part so basically if you visit me then chances are I will visit you. At first I was dropping three hundred cards a day and maybe sixty to seventy would return the favor but now I average around a hundred a day and normally about ninety five will come back. For awhile I would just buy a ton of really cheap ads like two or four entrecards a piece, not worried about other traffic but hoping that the actual blog owner would be come a regular dropper. This experiment worked alright I guess but it has been awhile since I tried it lately. I have close to twenty one thousand credits in the EC bank so maybe one day I will go on a spending spree. Anyway back to the point if your blog is new or relatively new and your looking for a fast way to pick up visitors Entrecard may be the key for you.

3. Stumbleupon worked for a long time and for the first five months the majority of my traffic came from them. In the last couple of weeks I have basically put it on the back shelf with the odd attempt but nothing at the level it was before. Again I have a ton of content already stumbled and it still trickles in at an alright pace.

4. Unique Visits Versus Page Visits - With stumbleupon it tended to be one for one or basically the person sees your page then bang is off to another. As of late due mostly to search engines now the page visits are twice to three times higher which I guess means more people are actually sticking around for a while. If I ever try to stick ads on here again apparently page visits are more important then unique visitors but I could be wrong.

5. Your name - The better your name and reputation gets so does the offers from others from around the web world to participate on their sites. If you have a reputation for being a troll chances are you are going to spend a lot of time under the bridge. One of the areas that I really need to improve on is commenting a lot more on other people`s blogs and my own for that matter. Most new blogs that I discover come from comment sections of friends sites, I like the persons comment so I go check out their blog to see what else they have to say.

My statistics are going to go down from what they use to be as the mental switch has gone from quantity to quality readers. The purpose of this blog is to raise awareness and promote understanding regarding mental illness and not a popularity contest (took me awhile to remember that). Anyway that is what I have learned so far and if I can be of any assistance just drop me a line and I will do what I can. Take care.

Blog This And That

I guess I should explain the whole directory thing. To me every mental health blog is a place of courage and strength. It is one thing having to live with a mental disorder(s) but to actually come out and announce it to the world in the hope that it will create more awareness and do some damage to the stigma that surrounds mental illness is a whole new ball of wax. Hopefully by more and more people sharing their stories with time we will make a difference. I have been blessed by the amount of support I receive here on untreatableonline so in a way it is my way of trying to give a little back by offering a place where people can announce their blog to the world and at the very least they get a back link to a site whose page rank is pretty high.

Today I am going to transfer the majority of my blog roll into the directory with a couple of key words for the description and I am hoping the writers of these sites will send me their own personal view of their work. A number of people have mentioned that they did send their information but it did not come through for if the link is not up in twenty four hours please resend it.

When I first started this blog one of the first major sources of encouragement came from the Executive Director of the Florida Borderline Personality Association a wonderful program used to increase the awareness and crush the stigma surrounding BPD. Today they are participating in a online contest so to speak which people basically vote for the best charity out of the group and the winner gets a donation to their worthy cause. Do me a favor and go visit Search Kindly and vote for FBPA. Thanks.

An Open Invitation

I think I would like to start a mental health directory composed of personal blogs so here is the plan. If you would like to be a part of it leave a comment on the directory section with the following information:

1. Name of Blog
2. Address of Blog
3. A brief summary of what you write about

Not sure how well this is going to work but it is worth a shot. I will check out every blog sent my way just to make sure it is a personal blog and that the summary is accurate. Plain and simple that is the way this works. Before anyone asks no you do not need to provide a link to my blog. Take care.

A Detour In The Road

A characteristic that seems to be common with those with Borderline Personality Disorder is they can go on and on about their life with little to no emotion. This is not because we do not process emotions in the normal way but they are not talking about themselves but someone else. There is me and then there is what everyone else sees the so called front man of the show. The problem is when after you let all of this information out about some of your deepest darkest periods is that your brain finally makes the connection that it is not two separate people but just one person and then you have to deal with the ramifications of it.

This blog was meant to hopefully help others see what it is like living with mental illness and what I have done to basically get through the days. I felt the best way to do this is to use my own life to draw examples from and I do believe it goes a long way to show the true picture of the power that mental illness has but the problem right now is I feel rather exposed. For a long time I was statistic crazy always trying new methods to push up the view count but a reality hit home the other day which is 85,000 plus people know my secrets. Now I have been pretty careful on only showing one side to my life and I do so for my protection plus the point of this blog was never about me but to get people to see mental illness for what it is hoping it will bring some understanding and lift the stigma that surrounds it.

I am going to take the next few days off and decide what I want to do with this blog. So far the options are the following:
A) Any post that hits too close to home I am going to either rewrite it using a fictional character or delete it completely
B) Figure out the direction I want this blog to take next whether it be a purely informational site or keep it going in the same direction it is now but be more aware of my boundaries.
C) Make this little corner of the web disappear completely.

I don't want to jump to a conclusion that I am going to regret later on so I have given myself to Thursday to make a decision. Whatever I do decide I want to thank each and every one of you who has supported me in the last six months and I hope I was able to help in your own battles and journey in some capacity. Take care.

The Experience Project

Over the course of the blog and especially in the last few weeks I have been approached by a variety of different sites to participate on. For whatever the reason none of the sites really felt right whether it is because their core group was that of mental professionals or the purpose of the site was to make money and not to increase the awareness about mental illness.

A couple of days ago I was approached by the webmaster behind The Experience Project to become a featured member so I scooted over to the site and was pleased with what I saw. This site brings people from all over to share their common experiences about any given subject and boy is there a lot of topics about darn near everything under the sun.

A group that I joined named "I Battle Depression" has over a thousand stories about members battles with depression and the support from this section appears to be very strong.

Anyway if you are looking for a new community to participate in this may be the place for you.

An Explanation

Over the course of this blog I have been "tagged" by other sites where basically someone asks five questions then answers them and then lists off five other blogs to continue this activity. Basically the electronic version of a chain letter. When this type of post does show up in my email I tend to hit delete rather quickly and I am going to try and explain why:

1. The purpose of untreatableonline was to be a voice from the darkness that speaks out on various aspects of mental health not to be a personal blog. It is a fine line between the two but it is a boundary I am very much aware of.

2. See "Reasons why I am untreatableonline"

3. The reason I maintain a blogroll is to share the sites that I visit on a very regular basis and that I believe offer something towards the battle of mental illness. I plan to steal the idea from Cracked Head Blog an offer a brief summation of each but for whatever the reason I have not got around to it yet.

I do appreciate that this blog is being mentioned by other writers but when comes to memes I will not participate. I am not doing a very good job of explaining myself here but I hope you will understand. Take care.

A Major Milestone

When I started this blog back in early January I honestly thought that the only person who would read it would be me. In the past five months the amount of support and encouragement that I have received is overwhelming. This blog has helped me to get through a number of issues and more importantly is a constant reminder that I am not alone in the fight against mental illness nor the stigma that surrounds it.

This last month has been a good one for this little corner of the web as not only did Google finally rank me with a respectable four but sometime yesterday this blog passed its 100,000 page view and its 70,000 visitor. In celebration of these achievements I have decided the best way is to recap the ten top posts according to page views. Before I get to that I would like to thank each and every person who has taken the time to stop by to listen to my story. Alright on with the list.

1. Highs and lows of Borderline Personality Disorder
- The chaos that is BPD comes through in this article and how one shift in perspective changes everything.

2. What not to do when dealing with someone who is mentally unwell
- The title basically covers the information gathered in this article. May possible be my favorite post so far.

3. What the hell?
- Freaking side effects of the various medication I have been on over the last few years.

4. Dentist = Anxiety
- A trip to the dentist and all that it entails.

5. When money comes first
- No matter how much I complain about doctors, therapists, nurses and other mental health professionals the main problem with the system is due to severe budget cuts that has left its mark.

6. Loss of contact with reality
- All about psychosis and psychotic behavior.

7. The best parts of having a mental illness
- They say focus on the positive so that is what I did here.

8. How God turns into the Devil
- This article was the result of a patient who killed his therapist and I attempted to make sense out of it.

9. How my personal war effects my son
- Unfortunately my illness does not effect only me. May be the hardest post I have ever written.

10. School shooters the mental health link
- Again writing about something I read online and trying to figure out the reasoning the shooter may have had.

Well there is the top ten posts according to page views. Thank you again for all of the support and encouragement over these last five months. Take care.

Sunday's Poem

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the tother, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy ans wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost
Great link about the poet

Borderline Personality Awareness Campaign

Well this month is officially over halfway done so lets recap the campaign so far.

The Official Declaration

1. BPD SERIES ONE - Borderline Personality DSM Criteria. All of the official qualifications needed to get this lovely disorder using examples from my own life.

2. BPD SERIES TWO - Highs and lows of Borderline Personality Disorder. The goal was to show how one person can have two completely different views on the same subject with a shift of perspective.

3. BPD SERIES THREE - A crash course on manipulation and Borderline Personality Disorder. A post that tries to make sense out of a negative behavior.

4. BPD SERIES FOUR - Borderline Personality Disorder. Basically the difficulty of living with this disorder and how it makes smart people stupid.

5. BPD SERIES FIVE - How I diagnosed myself. BPD is so obvious that my doctor never realized it then I did something stupid and opened my mouth.

6. BPD SERIES SIX - Rage? Want to see a rage? The reasons why an extreme reaction seem necessary in the land of BPD.

There it is my so called attempt at trying to put my spin on BPD and hopefully increase the awareness surrounding this potentially devastating disorder. Overall this great plan of bringing out Borderline Personality Disorder on a much larger level through the act of the official declaration seems to be rather quiet in my opinion throughout the media but again that is not a surprise.

I read over at Furious Seasons that Mel Gibson has come forward to say he suffers from manic depression (that is Bipolar for those living in the twenty first century) and to be honest part of me was thankful he did not say it was Borderline Personality Disorder. Now whether this diagnosis is accurate or he is looking for a way to get his career out of the gutter remains to be seen. Take care.

This And That

For the first time another blog author has asked me to post on her site "Dirty Little Secret". To me this is a tremendous honor as her blog is easily one of my favorite mental health sites and it is full of such courage and strength tackling issues most people would not go near.

I received an email today from the author of "In My Heels" which reminded me of why I continue to share my story with others. "In My Heels" is a self improvement site like no other and deserves a whole lot of attention.

Well it has been awhile since I updated the effort put into Entrecard and even though I no longer drop the maximum amount of cards it is still a good source of traffic and has brought a lot of people over here who have decided to stick around. For a while I was advertising on the cheapest sites I could find and it was working alright but something of the process was bothering me so I changed the way I use Entrecard. From now on if someone wishes to advertise on my blog they need to be a somewhat consistent dropper and I am no longer going to post my card on sites I barely look at. I am sure this may effect the numbers but the new outlook sits better with me. Plus I have well over ten grand in credits sitting in my dashboard so I am not exactly hurting.

The blog roll has taken on a new look which should be easier to navigate plus the addition of a couple more sites.

Guess that is it for now. I hope everyone has a good weekend and the weather in your area is a lot better then it is here. Take care.

An Article For Wednesday

With roofers banging away at the top of my place it is difficult to concentrate so I am going to share an article I found the other day over at MSNBC.

start of article -

In search of the good old nervous breakdown
Everyone from actors to housewives used to have them, so what were they?

When Joe Livernois was a child, his father sometimes spent days racing around giddily and talking non-stop — then he'd crash, become severely depressed, withdraw into his room and spend most of his time sleeping.

If anyone talked about his father’s increasingly erratic behavior, they said he was “having a nervous breakdown,” said Livernois, now a 54-year-old editor at the Monterey (Calif.) Herald, who recently wrote a series of columns about his father.

"‘Nervous breakdown’ was the malady everybody was suffering at the time. I guess it was a polite way of saying, ‘Your father’s just not right,'" he said. "There wasn’t a lot of knowledge, and this was the 1950s, 1960s, the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, when a whole lot of stuff got swept under the rug.”

These days, Livernois’ dad would probably be diagnosed as bipolar, he says. The huge advances in psychiatry made over the last few decades, combined with a new cultural ethos that encourages straight talk about subjects that were once taboo, has helped bring mental illness out of the shadows. Therapists today are often central characters in movie and TV shows. Diagnoses like “obsessive-compulsive,” "bipolar" and "schizophrenia" have found their way into the mainstream vernacular.

But old-fashioned ”nervous breakdowns”? Hardly anyone mentions those anymore.

“I haven’t heard that term in years,” said Mike Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a national advocacy organization based in Arlington, Va. “’It’s from another era.”

The term — a vague catch-all phrase that could mean anything from a psychotic episode to having a bad day — is not a medical term, doctors say, but it was a popular one that was gentle, non-specific and therefore non-threatening, and could serve as a cover.

It may have even garnered a certain cache, since celebrities and movie stars like Frances Farmer and Judy Garland were often described as having nervous breakdowns, even when their problems might have more accurately been described as alcoholism or prescription drug abuse. In the 1961 Academy Award-winning movie, “Splendor in the Grass,” Natalie Wood plays a lovesick young woman from a small town in Kansas who is institutionalized after being abandoned by her boyfriend, a wealthy Yale student played by Warren Beatty, and having a breakdown.

“The world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years or so, in terms of our understanding of mental disorders,” said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, director of the American Psychiatric Association’s division of research. “When I was a kid, there were references to relatives or neighbors, who had a ‘nervous breakdown’ and had to go to a hospital, and dropped out for a period of time, and nobody would really be very specific about what the nature of the illness was.”

Treatments varied from the "rest cure," isolation and preventing all stimulation in the 19th century (described by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1891 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”) to hydrotherapy, electric shock treatments, insulin treatment and lobotomy in the 20th century. Patients who were hospitalized often faced long-term commitments.

“People are no longer just disappearing from the community in the same way that they did when that term was coined and was in use,” Regier said. “The major emphasis now with the mentally ill is on recovery.”


In past decades, the suggestion that someone had a disorder of the nerves or nervous system was an attempt to place mental illness in the same category as a physical ailment, like a stomach disorder, said Edward Shorter, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Toronto, who wrote the book “A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac.”

“It was a fig leaf,” Shorter said. “It suggested this was a non-inherited, non-genetic and more acceptable condition than mental illness — which was believed to be genetic and inherited.”

Psychiatrists emphasize that the term “nervous breakdown” is utterly meaningless from a medical, clinical point of view. If patients today use it to describe a crisis they went through or when giving a family history, clinicians press for more detailed information.

“It would be like saying someone had a fever, instead of diagnosing different types of infections,” said Myrna Weissman, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons who studies women and depression. “It’s useful to know someone has a fever, but just as we know so much more about what causes fever, we in psychiatry have a much more sophisticated understanding of the different diagnostic categories.”

In 1952, only 106 types of mental disorders were listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the “DSM,” the American Psychiatric Association’s book classifying mental illnesses. But the fourth and current edition of lists 297 — nearly three times as many.

Treatments have improved over the decades as well. The advent of antipsychotic medications has meant that seriously ill patients can often return to community life as long as they continue treatment and have support systems in place, Regier said.

Since the 1950s, the number of institutionalized patients in the United States has dropped from 550,000 to fewer than 30,000 patients, Regier said. Patients themselves have changed too. Now people are much more educated about medical conditions and aggressive in seeking information. In the age of tell-all TV shows and support groups, people don’t shy away from calling things by their real names.

Still, code words haven’t disappeared completely. One favorite euphemism used today, particularly regarding celebrities, is “exhaustion.” In recent years, Ashlee Simpson, Amy Winehouse, rapper Eminem, Colin Farrell and Lindsay Lohan have all been reported to be suffering from “exhaustion,” in many cases before checking themselves into rehabilitation centers to treat substance abuse.

Named by pop culture
The term “nervous breakdown” seems to have originated in popular culture, said Dr. Jonathan Metzl, an associate professor of psychiatry and women’s studies at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

“We use the term medicalization a lot now to talk about how disease concepts, like anxiety, depression and stress, come from medicine and trickle down to society,” he said. “But with ‘nervous breakdown’ the process was reversed — it was defined by popular culture.”

If anything, he said, “Medicine and psychiatry did everything they could to clamp down on it.”

During World War II, Dr. William C. Menninger, who served as chief psychiatric consultant for the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, developed the concept of “the breaking point,” which was originally applied to soldiers in combat but was later extended to the strains of modern life, Regier said.

“We know that under enough pressure, continued over a long period of time, anyone can be overwhelmed, and bend. All of us have a breaking point,” Menninger wrote in a 1959 paper.

Though many tend to associate nervous breakdowns with women of the 1950s and 1960s who were trapped in very narrow societal roles as mothers and housewives — Betty Friedan’s 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique” talked about the “problem that has no name” that plagued women who were unfulfilled as homemakers — it was men who were seen as most vulnerable to stress earlier in the century, said Dr. Laura Hirshbein, an assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Michigan who studies the history of medicine and psychiatry.

“Men were definitely seen as very susceptible to nervous breakdowns — historians of masculinity describe the switch in men’s work from the late 19th century, when they were in small businesses, with bosses they knew and communities where they felt in control, to the 20th century, when they worked as bureaucrats in large organizations,” Hirshbein said. “It was very stressful for them.”

A pill to calm the nerves
In the 1950s, the new antianxiety medication Milltown was developed and marketed to both men and women, to calm women’s nerves and to ease work pressures for men, Metzl said.
“The idea was that modern society was moving too fast for our fragile psyches.”

Many of the same stresses remain today, it’s just that we’re more specific in what we call our response to them. What used to be blamed on nerves and nervous breakdowns is now often recognized as anxiety or depression and stress is often cited as the culprit.

“Depression is now a socially accepted diagnosis,” Shorter said. “Now everyone’s depressed.”

Roni Caryn Rabin is a health writer who lives in New York City. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday and Real Simple magazine, among other publications, and is author of the book, "Six Parts Love: A Family's Battle with Lou Gehrig's Disease." She teaches journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

End of article - Original can be found here

- Just a quick note the mass exit from mental hospitals had more to do with the introduction of a powerful anti psychotic then people actually getting better. Pete Earley book "Crazy" covers this period of mental health pretty well. Take care.

Untreatable's Blogroll

The list of blogs below has been in the making for quite some time now. Each blog tells a personal story that is going a long way to fight the stigma that surrounds mental illness. Full of strength, courage and insight providing the most essential ingredient to recovery which is hope. Take the time to bookmark this site and visit my friends listed below and trust me the experiences they share will change the way mental illness is viewed. If you believe that your story fits into this list just send me a link and I will be sure to check it out. Take care.

(E) Entrecard widget present

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

- Avoidance Junkie

- BPD In OKC

- Gracefully Abnormal

- Jackal

- Polar Bear Blog

- Swirls in my head



DEPRESSION

- Adventures in Time and Space (E)

- Bits and Bobs

- Brain menu (E)

- Clinically Clueless

- Cracked Head Blog

- Depression Marathon (E)

- I trust when dark my road

- How Is Bradley

- Patient Anonymous

- Shiv's Brain

- Storied Mind

- Your Wandering Mind On Depression



POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

- But A Dream Within A Dream

- Dirty Little Secret (E)

- Here and now (E)

- Mulligrubs



VARIOUS

- Asdquefty's Journal (E)

- Florida Borderline Personality Disorder Association

- Healthy living that fits your life

- I'm A Nice Person (E)

- In My Heels (E)

- Mental Health Blog (E)

- Ringtailed Squealers (E)



MEDICATION/HEALTH RESOURCES:

- Crazy Boards

- Crazy Meds

- Healthboards

- Keep The Doctor Away

- Wrong Diagnosis

* Trying to classify some of the above blogs is not as simple as it appears. If any of the above writers disagree with the section their blog is in just send me a note and I will gladly change it. Take care.

The Wonderful World Of Hockey

I managed to go a hundred and fifty plus posts without writing about hockey which is rather impressive considering how much time I devout to watching and reading about Canada's sport. Well mind you Canada's national sport is apparently lacrosse for some reason and if you look at the participation numbers a hell of a lot more people play organized soccer then organized hockey. That all being said hockey is always a topic of discussion no matter where you go especially this time of year.

My hockey career never did take off for a couple of reasons and the main one being I can not skate to save my life. Sure I can whip around the boards at full tilt but the only way I know how to stop is to either hit the sides of the rink or run into someone else.

Right now I am supporting two different teams. The Ottawa Senators namely because of the location and supporting the Toronto Maple Leafs is the equivalent to taking a stress test that never ends. The other team is the Detroit Red Wings and there is a little bit of explanation here. I grew up in a NHL city then moved to Ontario when I was sixteen and still supported my hometown team but then it was sold and moved to the USA. So I needed to pick a new team and at this time the Ottawa Senators did not exist. Montreal Canadians is the French equivalent of the Toronto Maple Leafs so they were out and the many playoff battles with teams from Western Canada kept them off the list so the only option left was to go with the Detroit Red Wings as my favorite player played for them Steve Yzerman.

I have been to a number of hockey games at all sorts of different levels and cities. The experiences have ranged from exciting and fun to downright scary at times. Going to games from local teams tends to depend on how well the parents behave themselves more then the game when it comes to how positive the experience was. A lot of parents believe their child is the next superstar and the amount of pressure on the kid can get pretty high at times. It is pretty easy to match the screaming parent to the child on the ice for the kids face tends to go bright red with embarrassment.

One of the main reasons organized soccer has so many more participants then hockey is the sheer cost. With soccer all you need is a pair of shoes and shin pads where the equipment for hockey is long and expensive. There may have been multiple people with the talent of Steve Yzerman or Sidney Crosby but due to the cost of the sport they never had the opportunity to find out. There are now programs that are out there to help people from lower income classes the ability to get new equipment but even that can only go so far. Soccer and Basketball are much easier on the pocketbook. Take care.

That Did Not Work

I gave Google AdSense a try for the last five days or so and it was not what I was expecting. Close to thirty five hundred views and I made a whopping $2.32 so needless to say that is not going to pay the bills. Anyway all of the ads have been removed at least till I figure out a better way which will cover the costs of this blog namely the internet connection. The goal is to make around three bucks a day which does not sound unrealistic especially with every second blog stating they are making thousands a month. Maybe I should sell my EntreCard credits? Heck who knows. Anyone with any ideas this would be a really good time to pipe up. Take care.

Oh Where Oh Where Can She Be

I joined a popular online dating site about a year or so ago in the order to meet people and hopefully to find that special someone. I have met some nice people and some not so nice people but I guess that is just the way things work. In the past I have had some success with online dating as that is how I met my exwife so I figured it was worth a shot to try it again.

Dating with mental illness is a pretty neat trick and a good majority of people try to keep their current situation hidden from potential matches. This is not the way I live my life so normally by the end of the second or third conversation and way before meeting the potential mate in person I send off an email that covers my current mental situation. The reactions upon revealing really differ from the person just disappearing to others who have no difficulties with my life situation to people disclosing their own mental difficulties (which there is a lot of on this particular site).

There are days when I wonder if I would be better off just keeping my diagnosis hidden in the closet and chances are my dating life would be a lot more active but there is a part of my brain that considers this to be lying which is the wrong way to start any relationship. So I wait and hope that someone is going to take the time to see through what is written down in some doctors file and see the person that I am. Yes I do have issues but I believe I have a lot to offer for the right individual.

Another issue that I have found on a variety of dating sites is there is a lot of people who are more interested in the chase then the actual case. A good portion of people even though they say they are looking for a long term relationships prefer to date a wide assortment of people and pull away once it crosses that serious line.

Being a former mental health professional is actually helpful when it comes to online dating as I tend to see through the lines a little bit easier and basic counseling skills quickly separate who the person is and who they are trying to be. It becomes rather obvious when the same questions repeatedly bring up different response.

My style on dating sites and in life is to just lay everything on the table then let the person decide whether or not I am a potential match as I have spent way too much time discovering who I am to present a false self image. For some people this approach works but it also scares a good number of people away who are not use to someone being completely honest on the site. Mind you it could just be me and who I am that is keeping me single. Take care.

Northern Ontario Poet

This Sundays work of poetry is from a writer located in my neck of the woods or at least close by it. Charlie Smith is a farmer/poet whose works are found in a series of collection and has been featured on CBC radio throughout Canada. Anyway I have read almost all of his works and he definitely adds a different voice to the poetry landscape. Here is one of his works:

Resurrection

I am writing a poem in the taggy old field:
Turn down the alders and grin —
When was the last time it sang of its yield?
The spruce whisper, “Long has it bin;
Long as a lifetime, long as a log,
Many a winter did nest.”
But I plow down the poplar, the chokecherry bush,
The whispering spruce and the rest.
I find the old furrows and strike out anew;
I sing to the red diesel roar,
And the field heaves her bosom and flexes her arms,
And the sod on the mull-boards says, “More!”
I am writing a poem and my black lines are straight,
A rhyme that a dead man can see;
And he circles the edges just out of my sight,
And he whispers “Oh, thank you!” to me;
“Long was she fallow and ruin, my love,
Long lay my pretty, despair.”
He reflects on my mull-boards each time I go round —
You can’t see him quite, but he’s there.
I am the savior of land gone to brush;
I am the rod and the way.
And of all of the poems I’ve written so far —
The plow wrote my favorite today.

©Charlie Smith

You can find more of his work at "Your Scrivener Press". Take care.

The Problems In Running A Mental Health Blog

Over the last few days I have visited quite a few mental health blogs and a number of them are either really slowing down in the number of post or have announced that they are taking a hiatus. I think that every mental health blog tells a unique story and can go along way in the fighting the stigma of mental illness but there are consequences to maintaining a personal mental health site.

1. I find to really connect with the reader it is important to share all of the facts and the emotions regarding a specific event or events. The problem with this is focusing on the past can bring up emotions that may have not been properly dealt with and send the monster back into motion. On more then one occasion I have started a post that I felt was important to cover but realized half way through that this was not a good idea for me mentally.

2. The reason for posts on this site to suddenly switch to a poetry day or information about this blogs performance is mentally I need to take a break from digging through my head. I can not allow my brain to stay in an area that for lack of a better word is risky and every once in a while I need a little mental vacation.

3. The majority of the posts on this site have been told to a variety of doctors, nurses, therapists and other mental health professionals so by the time they hit this blog a lot of their power has been taken away or taken back. There are a few posts on this site that are the result of the emotional state I am in at the time and they are pretty easy to make out as they tend to be all over the map which was the state my brain was in when I wrote the darn thing. I fight the urge to delete this type of post later on but I don't as I believe they really show the effect of long term mental illness as one moment I am up but the next second I may be spiraling out of control.

4. Having a clear focus and mission of a blog goes a long way. This blog is meant to help lift the veil off of mental illness but at the same time it does provide me with a place to explore the inner workings of my brain. This is not my job and I have not made a cent off of this site which allows me to write when I want and about pretty much everything. If this blog was solely about one mental illness and making money chances are this conversation would have ended a long time ago as the second you force yourself to write is when you start to lose control.

5. One advantage I have, believe it or not, is the Borderline Personality Disorder. It is rather easy for me to separate myself from what I am writing about a good percentage of the time. I can sit there and rattle off my life history with almost no emotion for in my head it is like I am talking about someone else. A friend of mine once said "Someone with BPD can talk to you for hours about their life but manage to tell you nothing". Splitting has its benefits.

I guess in the end it is about maintaining the line of what is good for you and what is good for the blog. If I felt that this blog was impacting my mental stability in a negative fashion then it would be time for me to either walk away or reestablish my priorities when it comes to this blog.

As I mentioned earlier I believe every mental health blog offers something in the war against the stigma of mental illness as they tell the story that matters. Don't judge us because of our disorders but take the time to see through the writing and see the human being who is fighting this particular type of monster. Hopefully through our journals written out on the web in the end we will make a difference and help others who are wearing similar shoes. Take care.

A Blog Milestone

Sometime yesterday this blog passed it 50,000 unique visitor which is not to shabby for a site that is showed up at the beginning of February of this year so I guess I must be doing something right.

This blog started as just a place for me to get the thoughts out of my head to hopefully slow down the traffic a bit. It also gives me an opportunity to look at situations in my life from a different perspective in the hope I could somehow figure out what I needed to do to get to a better position.

At the beginning I had no intentions of really pushing this blog in terms of getting it out there to let the rest of the world to see but in the end curiosity took over. Even though the odds of someone getting a mental illness is one in four there is a sense that you are in a battle all by your lonesome. So I thought maybe someone in similar shoes will cross this blog and be able to identify with it which may provide a little bit of assistance in their own battle. Then there are the people who have a person or people in their lives who they really want to help but not really sure how to so maybe by reading through my posts they can gain an insight that they can use to help someone else. To what extent this blog has achieved those goals I really do not have a clue but I do know it is reaching at least a few people with the right intention. The mission statement of this blog is to lift the veil off of mental illness and I hope at least for the most part that I have been doing so.

The best part of the blog is the people I have met because of it. Going through the steps of promoting this site I came across sites that before I never knew existed and was reminded of the reach of mental illness. There are a lot of common diagnosis but the individuals and stories are very unique in one way or another. Hopefully through the blogging platform the group of us will be able to help change the face of mental illness and reduce the stigma that is attached to it. For a partial list of wonderful sites by my friends go check out this blogs directory here. By the way if your not on the list and think you should be just send me a note..

It has been a while since I made a list so here are the top five posts that this blog has produced and to see the complete list again go visit the directory for untreatableonline.com.

1. What not to do when dealing with someone who is mentally unwell

2. The best parts of having a mental illness

3. Highs and lows of Borderline Personality Disorder

4. School shooters the mental health link

5. When money comes first

Thank you for all of your support and I hope you stick around for some time. If there is a mental health area that you would like to see my perspective from just leave me a message and you never know. Take care.