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Bipolar Disorder

How Does Bipolar Disorder Affect Thinking?

Bipolar disorder is widely known for causing shifts in mood, energy, and activity levels. People often think of manic highs and depressive lows as the defining features of the condition. However, bipolar disorder affects much more than emotions. It can also influence how a person thinks, processes information, makes decisions, and views themselves and the world around them. Changes in thinking are common during mood episodes, but many people also experience cognitive difficulties between episodes. These changes can affect work, relationships, school, and everyday life, sometimes as much as the mood symptoms themselves. Understanding how bipolar disorder affects

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Therapy

Can Trauma Cause Memory Loss?

Trauma can affect the mind in many ways, and memory is one of the areas most commonly impacted. Some people struggle to remember parts of a traumatic event, while others notice gaps in their childhood memories or have trouble recalling everyday information after experiencing extreme stress. These experiences often lead to an important question: Can trauma cause memory loss? The answer is yes. Trauma can contribute to different types of memory problems, ranging from temporary forgetfulness to difficulty recalling specific events or periods of life. However, trauma-related memory loss does not affect everyone in the same way. The

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Borderline Personality Disorder

Is BPD Caused by Trauma?

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a complex mental health condition that affects emotions, relationships, self-image, and behavior. People with BPD often experience intense mood swings, fear of abandonment, impulsive actions, and difficulty maintaining stable relationships. Because many individuals diagnosed with BPD have experienced difficult childhoods or traumatic events, a common question arises: Is BPD caused by trauma? The short answer is that trauma can play a significant role in the development of BPD, but it is not the only cause. Researchers believe BPD develops from a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors. Trauma may increase a

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fear of eating in front of others
Eating Disorder

Fear of Eating in Front of Others (Deipnophobia): What It Is and When to Get Support

You sit down at a restaurant, and your appetite disappears. A work lunch gets scheduled, and you spend the morning dreading it. A birthday dinner you actually want to attend starts to feel like something to survive. If eating in front of other people makes you anxious — not just mildly self-conscious but genuinely stressed, sometimes to the point of avoiding situations entirely — you are not alone. And the thing you are experiencing is more common and more understood than most people realize. What Is the Fear of Eating in Front of Others Called? The formal name

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compulsive overeating symptoms
Eating Disorder

Compulsive Overeating Symptoms: Signs to Know

Everyone overeats sometimes. A holiday dinner that went longer than expected. A stressful week that ended with too much takeout. That is part of being human. Compulsive overeating is something different. It is not about the occasional overindulgence. It is a recurring pattern where eating feels out of control — where you eat past the point of fullness, often in secret, often in response to emotions rather than hunger, and where the guilt and distress that follow do not stop the pattern from happening again. If that sounds familiar, this article is for you. What Is Compulsive Overeating?

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Eating Disorder

Food Anxiety Symptoms: Signs You Should Know

Most of us have complicated feelings about food at some point. Maybe you stress-eat when work gets overwhelming, or you feel vaguely guilty after a big meal. That is pretty normal. But for some people, food becomes a persistent source of anxiety—not occasional stress, but a pattern of worry, dread, and mental preoccupation that follows them through every meal, every restaurant visit, and every social event where food is involved. That pattern has a name. And if it sounds familiar, it is worth understanding what is actually going on. What Is Food Anxiety? Food anxiety is not a

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Borderline Personality Disorder

What does borderline personality disorder feel like?

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) isn’t just “mood swings.” It’s an intense, ongoing experience where emotions, relationships, and self-image can feel unstable and overwhelming. People with BPD often feel everything more strongly and more quickly than others, and those feelings can be hard to control once they start. To understand what it feels like, it helps to break it down into the different areas of life it affects. Living with emotions that hit fast and hard One of the core experiences of BPD is emotional intensity. Feelings don’t come in gently—they show up suddenly and at full force. A

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Depression

How Depression and Poor hygiene effect each other

Depression doesn’t just stay in your thoughts—it shows up in daily habits. One of the most noticeable areas it affects is personal hygiene. At the same time, poor hygiene can make depression feel even worse. This creates a cycle that’s easy to fall into and hard to break if you don’t understand what’s happening. To really get this, you have to look at how each one feeds into the other. When basic self-care starts to feel like a burden Depression drains energy in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it. Tasks that used to feel

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Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

OCD and PTSD – and the relationship between the two

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are two different mental health conditions, but they can overlap in ways that are often confusing. Both involve intrusive thoughts, strong emotional reactions, and repetitive behaviors or mental patterns that are hard to control. To understand their relationship, you need to look at how each condition works on its own—and where they start to intersect. Two conditions with different starting points OCD and PTSD develop for different reasons, even though they may look similar on the surface. OCD is driven by obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images,

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Depression

Fictional Characters People With Depression Relate To

Depression is difficult to explain, especially to someone who hasn’t experienced it. It’s not just sadness—it’s a mix of emptiness, exhaustion, overthinking, and disconnection. Because of that, many people find it easier to relate to fictional characters who reflect those internal struggles. These characters don’t just tell a story. They give shape to feelings that are otherwise hard to describe. When someone sees their thoughts or behaviors mirrored in a character, it creates a sense of recognition—something that feels real and familiar. Why fictional characters feel more relatable than real explanations When people try to describe depression, it

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Behavioral Health

What is Behavioral Health?

Behavioral health is a term used to describe how your thoughts, emotions, and actions work together to influence your overall well-being. It looks at how you respond to stress, how you form habits, how you interact with people, and how your daily choices shape both your mental and physical health. It’s not limited to mental illness. Instead, it focuses on patterns—what you do consistently, how you think in different situations, and how those patterns either support or harm your life over time. A broader concept than mental health alone Many people assume behavioral health and mental health mean

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Depression

How to get FMLA for Depression

Taking time off work because of depression isn’t about weakness—it’s about recognizing when your mental health is affecting your ability to function. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) exists to give employees protected time off for serious health conditions, including mental health issues like depression. But getting approved isn’t automatic. You need to understand the process and handle it properly. What qualifies as depression under FMLA FMLA doesn’t cover every case of stress or low mood. For depression to qualify, it must be considered a serious health condition. That usually means your symptoms are interfering with your

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