change therapy

the following is a press release from vancouver’s north shore schizophrenia society.  since no-one seems to have picked it up yet, i’m publishing it here.  it addresses the important question of when involuntary admission for serious mental illness is applicable, and the involvement of family members. vancouver coastal, in a review of the death by [...]

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tomorrow night at 6pm PST I will be hosting the weekly #mhsm chat on twitter. #mhsm stands for mental health and social media. #mhsm was started by amy kiel, an ardent mental health activist. the topic of the chat will be mental health and addiction. #mhsm typically uses between 5 and 8 questions to stimulate [...]

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this morning i went to michael schratter’s sendoff on his year-long ride don’t hide bicycle tour around the world to create awareness about mental health. let’s just stop here for a moment and picture this. and then let’s put a finger on how long this is. three hundred sixty five days. eight thousand seven hundred [...]

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are you in vancouver and looking for something to do on saturday? how about going to salmon insanity, run by gallery gachet apropos their mad pride events. gallery gachet is a collective of vancouver artists who have been affected by mental illness. i like how they make the connection between mental health and ecological health. [...]

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here’s another report from mental health camp. for some reason, i just can’t bring myself to get all official about it and write it from the point of view of the organizer, so i’ll write it from my personal point of view. so here are a few fragments, which do not do justice to the [...]

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i was going to write this nice first recap about mental health camp but then – well, life happened.  so instead here are the links to some people who have written a little about it.  enjoy! http://katanaville.com/mental-health-camp-at-ubc-honesty-on-the-internet/ http://www.covenanthousebc.org/blog/2010/07/16/mental-health-camp-recap http://theemperorhasnotoque.blogspot.com/2010/07/mental-health-camp-2010-my-view-after.html http://cuntinglinguist.com/2010/07/mental-health-in-which-steff-calls-a-spade-a-spade.html http://www.kidsideration.ca/?p=86 http://www.ridedonthide.com/2010/07/mental-health-camp-2010/

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my talk at mental health camp yesterday: it’s not about mental illness. it’s about mental health. in 1996, 510 murders occurred in canada. taking a prevalence rate of about 3% of violent crimes committed by people with mental illness, at the most, 16 of these people were killed by someone with a mental illness. i’m [...]

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these are my opening remarks for mental health camp today. if you’re on twitter, you can follow the conference via the hashtag #mhcyvr10. this is a conference that was conceived and organized in love, excitement and harmony. while we talk about stigma and silence, what is much more interesting to us is to move forward [...]

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please enjoy this guest post by my good friend jael, who is currently studying a fascinating therapeutic technique called focusing. when i was in my early 20′s i decided to switch from social science to computer science and math at university and live at home with my parents. when the offer of admission arrived, my [...]

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the following is a transcript of an email conversation with harold mayo, a mental health advocate from florida. harold is critical of talk of stigma in relationship with mental illness. this criticism arose in connection with the press release for mental health camp.  in the following you will see that in the exchange, i directed [...]

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earlier this week, our newspapers were full of the tragic story of clare shelswell, the little girl who was killed by her stepfather, peter wilson. on june 29, the vancouver sun devoted half of page 1 and 2 to it. on page 2, there was also an article that contained an interview with an expert [...]

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tomorrow is st. jean baptiste day. it’s also my birthday! image by fritz maingrette

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yay! we now have the speakers list and topics for mental health camp, the conference about the intersection between social media and mental health.  more information on the topics will trickle in by the end of june.  if you want to sign up to come to this conference, go to our eventbrite page.  there will [...]

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on may 18, i asked here on this blog, on twitter and on facebook what you think i should talk about at the upcoming mental health camp. this ended up being the winner: who gets to speak up about mental health? in the process of coming up with a useful definition for mental health, we [...]

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a little guest post by anne from creative fusion about the perhaps unlikely-seeming connection between mental health and spas: get thee to a spa. so a friend of mine ordered me several weeks ago. driving in incessant toronto traffic, organizing mentalhealthcampTO, putting in volunteer hours on another committee, keeping up with the never-ending to-do list [...]

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