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Showing posts from April, 2012

Stigma.

The other night I was in NUIM for a careers talk to help me to decided what I want to do after school. I decided that I would go to the talk on Paramedics and fire fighters and that I would also go to a talk on medicine. The first talk was amazing but that’s not why I am writing this post. The second talk was about medicine and there were three part to the talk. When we got to the third part to the talk that's when I learned something that I will never forget. We all know that there is a huge stigma attached to mental health but I always thought that health care professions such as doctors were to try and help reduce the stigma. And well now I know that I am wrong. It was near the end of the talk and we were being told about the different parts of medicine and the different specialities that you can go into after you become a doctor. One of the specialities was Physhcarity( I cant spell that but you know what I mean)  she had toils us all a bit about the other sections and when

Removing the labels.

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What is normal??

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Mental health can affect anybody and it doesnt make us any different from other people. There is no such thing as normal. Ask yourself the question What is normal?

Learning to cope with stress.

Stress..... stress can be very hard to deal with and can often affect people in many different ways. It can be both emotional and physical and can often affect people very little to very severe. some people hurt themselves when they feel stressed. When I would feel stressed sometimes I would self-harm because it gave me control in a stressful situation and I was able to cope with what was going on. However the feeling i got of being in control only lasted for a short while as after I self-harmed and my feeling of being in control went again I was out of control due to  the shame of self-harming. I had no control after I self-harmed because I had to wear long selves and hid the marks. It did nothing for me. It only made things worse and it took me a while to realise that using self-harm as a way of coping with stress only caused me more stress in the end. I used being stress as a reason to self-harm but soon I became addicted to it and I was not able to stop or control it anymore. One w

Learning to be mindful.

Something that i had to take part in while i was in hospital was a group called mindfulness. This group was all about learning to be in the moment. It can be considered as a type of meditation that helps people to feel more in control of their lives. Mindfulness means being aware of yourself and your surroundings. When you are being mindful you clear you mind of distracting thoughts and tune in to what you are doing at that very moment. This can often be very hard to do when you first try it I know it took me a while to get the hang of it and now I am still trying to get the hang of it. This can help you to deal with some of the hard times and also to help prevent you from self-harming. The basic steps for learning to be mindful are very simple and easy to do: Sit or lie quietly and notice your breath moving in and out. Notice anything else that you feel in your body. As thoughts come in to your head just let them go and not think about them. Remain aware of being in the