
Understanding OCD
Over the past few years with the increasing popularization of mental health therapy, many therapy terms have entered common language. This has had a positive effect in many ways with the increasing normalization of self-care and healthy boundaries. However, there has also been increasing confusion, such as in the dilution of the meaning of serious mental health conditions, over self-diagnosis of these conditions, and resulting confusion in what these conditions actually are and the extent to which people suffer from them (consider the many articles that start with “I cured my depression by…”, which make major depressive disorder sound a lot less serious and easier to recover from than it actually is).

Questions about Self-Care
Something that I’ve come across again and again in my personal life and clinical practice is people (myself included) bumping up against the fact that we have a harder time offering ourselves support when we’re struggling than we do offering it to others. In fact, this comes up so commonly that it’s led me to be suspicious about the whole thing. Is there something not quite right about our expectations for self-care?