YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

I am happy for you. I will try to draw strength from your example. I could use some of that today.

I'm judgmental and disapproving and selfish....the only thing I do well is irony. I can't help but point out the irony of judging yourself for being judgmental . I do this too. My therapist calls it judging the judging. I've also heard it called "double-dipping" a negative emotion. It's s...

Thanks for the book recommendation. I've heard of it, and I'm looking for a good resource to learn more about mindfulness.

MissingHiker, thanks for writing back. I would agree that "mindfullness" and "awareness" seem quite similar. I wish I had a better handle on those sorts of things. I'm working on it. BecomingKind & Kim, thanks for reminding me about that scene from Good Will Hunting. I had fo...

I'm sorry for the lengthy and scattered first post. No apology necessary, if you ask me. I liked all of what you wrote, but I'm especially interested in what you said about downtime and being alone with your thoughts. These can be very, very difficult times for me too. I spend so much energy to dis...

Justdom, there is so much in your post that really speaks to me. Actually, all of it does. I've found one piece of the puzzle that seems to be helping me quite a bit. If it's useful to other people, great. If not, that's fine too. It goes like this: the way other people treat me says a lot about the...

His reply? "you are violated my civil rights by viciously denying me access to the internet. i am documenting this. I have a right to access the internet." This whole situation is very, very strange. Is your brother perhaps an alcoholic/addict? Is there a lot of addiction in his family tr...

This is a tough situation for sure, but in my opinion you're doing the right thing by insisting that he have forward progress toward putting his life back together. Sometimes when we try to help people, we inadvertently take their power away. It's a very difficult thing to do to set limits and to he...

I looked online and found a non profit group that hosts a group therapy deal in my neighborhood by calling a mental help hotline which I found on google. The hotlines are really useful because they give you help specific to your location and situation. The group thing is really basic but it helps e...

I stomp out that kind of thinking immediately. Do you try to reframe or replace that thought with something else, for example, "this is difficult but this is what I need to do right now to build the kind of life that I want"? Or do you just ignore the "it shouldn't be this hard"...