For some students, college can be an incubator for mental-health issues. Make sure the college you choose is prepared to prevent, anticipate, and respond.
Confessing intrusive thoughts is a uniquely pernicious OCD ritual, but once the practice is identified, it can be relatively straightforward to address.
With every click, we wager our time, attention, and mental well-being for a jackpot of intermittent neural rewards. Here are five ways to better manage our engagement.
The lived experience of OCD with intrusive thoughts. It finds purchase in the unthinkable. It never spares you from a thought that’s too uniquely or intimately disturbing.
Facing a blank page is a formidable obstacle for any writer, and mental illness can make writing significantly more challenging, but it can be managed.
Breaking through OCD to access creativity doesn’t just allow us to tap a valuable cognitive resource, it can also generate novel strategies for fighting OCD itself.
When you tell yourself not to worry, you aren’t likely to silence the thought — you're engaging the worry in conversation, inviting it to explain itself further.
We project our peers and ourselves into a sitcom reality, where everyone stays together forever, where disagreements can always be resolved in 24 minutes.
Once conspiracy theories get in your head, they quickly become self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. These patterns of thinking are tricky to escape.
Americans have spent almost half a decade honing the weapons and armor needed for psychological warfare; these swords won’t easily be made into plowshares.
“Big Mouth” examines puberty through a sort of locker-room magical realism. In Season 4, Andrew Globerman’s anxiety symptoms return as repetitive OCD rituals.
The show "Big Mouth" vividly animates obsessive anxiety about sexual thoughts. It could help some OCD sufferers confront and come to terms with their own intrusive thoughts.
The year 2020 is proving to be uniquely stressful; we can’t afford to waste our mental resources on activities that make us miserable without generating personal or common good.
This election is precisely the kind of inevitable and yet impossible-to-grapple-with “threat” that can baffle our normal problem-solving strategies and lead to obsessive worry.
Why do we still pursue the thoughts, behaviors, and actions that we know are irrational and maladaptive, and perhaps the products of a mental health disorder?
Did you know OCD can inhibit your ability to clean your house? Certain symptoms feed directly into procrastination but it's possible to break the cycle.
OCD treatment, through ERP therapy, requires sufferers to confront danger and risk harm without protecting themselves. The coronavirus epidemic has flipped all this upside-down.
When you encounter a creative realization of your nightmares—in a comic, a book, a film, or perhaps in a piece you’ve created—you open space for new contexts and understandings.