Sometimes writing for a living drives me bonkers. Basically, I have to be brilliant on-command. And seriously. That’s hard.

You. Write. Be brilliant. Now!

It’s a lot of work for me. My brilliance gets tired and bogged down in the bits of my job I don’t like doing.

However, then I’m reminded there are many wonderful things about my job. Specifically, I get to learn new things, every day, all the time. While others work at real jobs I spend all day looking up facts and studies and learning things I didn’t know when I woke up.

I love that stuff.

3 Things I’ve Learned About Mental Health

So, I’m creating a weekly feature by sincerely flattering Jane Friedman and stealing her idea. (Jane writes Three Happy Things about writing once a week. Go check her out.) I’m not sure they will be three happy things, exactly, but I will be sharing three new things about mental health I’ve learned each week.

This will give me a chance to share smaller details that don’t make it into a full blog post, pimp the resources I like and otherwise share my knowledge.

On board? Great!

Three New Things About Mental Health

Not surprisingly, I’m inundated with information about mental illness/psychiatry/psychology. I’m constantly researching, reading articles, checking sources and other such things. I come across things I like and things I don’t.

1. What I don’t like – the British Psychological Society’s comments on the revisions proposed for the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). The British Psychological Society appears to be a non-profit group dedicated to psychology/psychologists. Which is fine. I’m a fan of psychology/psychologists. But their remarks on the DSM-V revision sound like propaganda nonsense. Not only can they not get through a paragraph without cutting-and-pasting, they seem to have only one thing to say – we don’t like the idea of diagnosing mental illness; oh, and we’re better than you.
2. What I do like – a Psychiatric Times article: The FDA Advisory Panel on the Reclassification of ECT Devices. I wrote about this issue for Breaking Bipolar to put it into smaller, more easily-digested chunks. (Why There Isn’t More Modern Data on ECT and Should the FDA Consider ECT Devices Less Dangerous.) But read the original article. It’s good and shines a light on yet another ECT issue that get’s people’s knickers all twisted.
3. What I think is interesting – a journal article on methods of schizophrenia treatment. This article is interesting because it outlines non-North American treatment options as well as standard antipsychotic/medication options. The article’s goal is to define schizophrenia recovery and use evidenced-based methods to determine the best path to schizophrenia recovery. Do yourself a favor and educate yourself about schizophrenia.

I do admit, those may not be easy reading, but they are worthwhile reading (or skimming, anyway).

I’ll see you next week when will I learn more and try to do better.

PS: If anyone has any direct knowledge of the British Psychological Society I’d love to hear it. They seem quite legitimate but I have to question the motives of such an odd report.