Are you normal? Do the concepts of Mental Health and Mental Illness serve any purpose other than to divide people arbitrarily and cause people shame that alienates them from themselves? Does psychiatry today, and more specifically biopsychiatry even believe that anyone is or can be normal? What is normal? Many argue that biopsychiatry – the direction the psychiatric profession is taking in defining mental illlness as “brain disorder” or “brain disease” and then seeking to treat it with all kinds of medications, many that do way more harm than good, is predicated on labeling almost everyone with something which calls into question just what disordered means. Dr. John Breeding Ph.D. was my guest on The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show, Wednesday August 4th, live at 3pm EST. You can now listen to the archived interview here. Dr. Breeding talked about, among other things, psychiatric oppression and what mental health consumers really do need to know and think more about when it comes to what mental illness is and how it can be most effectively treated and coped with if it even is what it is thought by so many people to be. What are the implications of biopsychiatry for people given the label and diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder?
What’s Wrong with Psychiatry’s Biology/Medication Approach to Mental Illness?
Is Borderline Personality Disorder a “brain disease”? Are the many mental illnesses now being labeled by some psychatrists – not all – who are forwarding biopsychiatry – often referred to as “biobabble”? What reason other than the big Pharma drug push in the United States does psychiatry have for this (in the eyes of some psychiatrists and psychologists) pseudo-science? A.J. Mahari interviews Dr. Niall McLaren and Australian psychiatrist and author of “Humanizing Psychiatry” and “Humanizing Madness” on The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Friday July 23, 2010 7pm EST.
Borderlines and Mind Games
Do people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder play mind games? Life coach and author, A.J. Mahari, who herself, recovered from BPD 15 years ago answers this question based upon her own life experience and her experience coaching hundreds of clients with BPD and who are loved ones of those with BPD.
Stigmatizing Borderline Personality – Darth Vader Diagnosed with BPD
Does Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker meet the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder? This was a questions posed, for some reason, and for an even less understandable reason answered by Eric Bui and colleagues at Toulouse University Hospital in France in what has been described as “a brazen act of arm-chair diagnosis”. Who does this serve? Who does this help – anyone? What is the meaning of this? Does it matter? It might mislead loved ones of those with BPD in unhelpful ways.
Psychosocial Skills and Borderline Personality Recovery
Life Coach and BPD Coach A.J. Mahari, in an excerpt from a workshop about Psychosocial skills, talks about how and why these skills are important for people with Borderline Personality Disorder. The reality that learning psychosocial skills is part of recovery from BPD. Mahari also talks about the main obstacle blocking the learning of these psychosocial skills when someone has Borderline Personality Disorder.
Borderline Personality and Pain – The Way To Recovery
Life Coach and BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, talks about the good news of the pain that is so formidable in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). For most people with BPD there is a profound amount of emotional pain. Pain that isn’t well tolerated. Pain that they do not have the emotional maturity or emotional skills to effectively cope with in healthy ways. Pain is not the negative that most with BPD think it is and experience it as being. It is experienced negatively because it is thought of and perceived as being negative.
Where It All Began Again – Excerpt A.J. Mahari BPD Memoir
A.J. Mahari recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder 15 years ago, in 1995. She is working on a memoir about that recovery. A.J. Mahari first heard those three words, Borderline Personality Disorder, in the dark ages of “treatment”, in 1975. At a time when most mental health professionals deemed Borderline Personality Disorder untreatable and spared little time in banishing those diagnosed with it. Borderline Personality Disorder were three key words that would profoundly effect her life that, at the time, seemed screamingly-quiet words that meant nothing and that quickly faded into an obscurity that mirrored her own lostness.
From Psychobabble to Biobabble – Dr. Andrew Scull on “A Psychiatric Revolution”
The rise in the prescribing of medication by many in the psychiatric profession has turned psychobabble: “writing or talk using jargon from psychiatry or psychotherapy” (dictionary.com) into biobabble: “knee-jerk biological determinism” (Kathleen H. Dockett, G. Rita Dudley-Grant, and C. Peter Bankart – authors of the book, Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology) What do you think? How can you find your way to effective and safe treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder or other forms of mental illness if you don’t stop to consider the pharmaceutical agenda that drives biobabble?
Mental Illness and The Brain – What’s Wrong with Psychiatry?
Mental Illness and The Brain – What’s Wrong with Psychiatry? Mental illness – is it biological or isn’t? What do you think? I guess I’m a rebel at heart, someone who thinks outside of the box. I know in my own experience, having recovered 15 years from Borderline Personality Disorder, that along the way, on my journey, I had a psychiatrist tell me I wouldn’t get better until they developed some pill – I didn’t believe him. He wasn’t correct. I fired him on the spot after that comment. That was 1987. That was before this notion now forwarded that everything mental illness is a “brain disorder”. Professional in psychiatry are speaking out against the “status quo” of mental illness as a “brain disorder”.
Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – End Negative Thought Patterns
Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises To Help You Change Negative Thought Patterns by Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, is a 102 page Ebook chalk full of information and 19 coaching exercises to help you change negative thinking into positive thinking. This Ebook stresses how much you will benefit from focusing postively on the here-and-now so that the decisions you are making today will help you create a positive, successful and productive future. And this Ebook doesn’t just tell you that, it provides you with practical exercises that will show you how to create positive change and how to not only stop focusing on the negative, stop worrying, but also stop feeling so stressed and stop ruminating on intrusive, negative, and unwanted thoughts. Not everyone can afford Life Coaching. This Ebook gives you exercises to do that I use with many of my clients and now you too can get this help and at a fraction of the price.
Abandonment is at the Heart of Borderline Personality Disorder
Rage in BPDThe fundamentally foundational epicenter of Borderline Personality Disorder is abandonment. This abandonment experience can be actual or perceived. Abandonment that is perceived is still very real to the person perceiving it. Many people are unaware of the scope
Rigid Thought Patterns in Borderline Personality Disorder
Rigid thought patterns in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are one of the central manifestations of all that Borderline Personality is and means in the lives of those who have been diagnosed with it. Loved ones and family members are often hurt and confused by these rigid thought patterns also. BPD Coach A.J. Mahari identifies three main reasons why people with BPD have such rigid thought patterns. These rigid thought patterns actually trap people in the active throes of BPD until and unless they get professional help to begin to learn how to think beyond the constricted magical thinking of a primitive concept of cause and effect. Primitive concepts of cause and effect that along with rigid thought patterns are at the center of The Legacy of Abandonment in BPD A legacy of abandonment that is the central cause of Rage in BPD.
A.J. Mahari on Emotional Mastery
A.J. Mahari, author, Life/BPD/Emotional Mastery Coach educates on the subject of emotional mastery in general, specifically related to those with Borderline Personality Disorder and their loved ones – non borderlines as well as her Emotional Mastery Life Coaching.
Intimacy and Borderline Personality Means Push-Pull
Borderlines are incapable of intimacy which leaves loved ones and family members – non borderlines -experiencing borderline push-pull which can be crazy-making. By the very nature of BPD, borderlines as the result of their defense mechanisms of splitting, projection, and narcissism, can’t help but push-pull. When those with untreated Borderline Personality Disorder try to get close to someone – attain emotional intimacy – they immediately fear engulfment so they push away or push the non borderline away.
Cure For Borderline Personality Disorder
Is there a cure for Borderline Personality Disorder? (BPD) How can you evaluate online information that promises to tell you about a cure if you buy a product or a certain book about a cure? Can you trust pitches that claim to tell you that they can cure BPD? Are they sales pitches or reality? Can loved ones of those with BPD trust pitches that promise to help them save relationships by purchasing information that advertises the cure for BPD or claims that someone has “solved” BPD in some nice neat across-the-board way?
Loneliness in Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder Inside Out Audio Podcast by author and Life Coach and BPD/Mental Health Coach, A.J. Mahari. December 14, 2009 – Loneliness in Borderline Personality Disorder.
People with Borderline Personality Disorder can’t help but experience a profound loneliness in whatever way that manifests for them because they are not connected to any stable sense of self – to the authentic self. This means that people with BPD are not only lonely in the world, they are lonely firstly and foremostly from within – living in and from an internally isolated and disconnected, often alienated, abyss where that sense of self should be.
Inside The Borderline Mind: Beyond BPD Jargon – Deeper Understanding For Loved Ones
The many distorted and wounded aspects inside the borderline mind means that there is much for loved ones to learn about the inner-workings of BPD so that they can further understand how to best cope with someone in their lives with Borderline Personality Disorder. What, if anything, do the terms “high-functioning” or “low functioning” applied to Borderline Personality Disorder mean?
BPD Recovery and Lost Relationships
Does recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder mean recovering lost relationships, friendships, or even family connections? In my experience the answer is often – no. It is important to grieve, let go and move on and to learn from past failed interpersonal dynamics so that they are not repeated in the future. What was then, was then. This is now. There are new people to meet, new relationships to forge and a recovered borderline has him/herself to fall back on in the meantime. Trying to turn back time can mean risking your recovery. It can mean falling back into old unhealthy patterns of relating. This, along with the reality of too much damage often done when one has BPD, means that moving forward is not only best for those you have hurt in the past, but it is also best for you as you continue to build your new life in recovery from BPD.
The View’s Joy Behar Stigmatized Borderline Personality Disorder
The View Co-host Joy Behar stigmatized Borderline Personaity Disorder on their Wednesday October 21, 2009 show in an interview with Glenn Close and her sister who were guests to talk about the importance of combating the stigma against mental illness, namely Bioplar Disorder, which Close’s sister has. Joy Behar, for some reason, who knows why, first had to further stigmatize BPD with inaccurate, uneducated information.
The View’s Joy Behar Stigmatizes Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder has long been the most stigmatized mental illness. Add to this now The View Co-host Joy Behar stigmatizing Borderline Personality Disorder ever further. On The View’s Wednesday October 21, 2009 show in an interview with Glenn Close and