We can understand the pain or history that drives an abuser's behavior, without excusing it or taking on responsibility for things they did to us. Sympathy & empathy can be tools-- but it's real important we not let them blur the lines for what was & wasn't acceptable behavior.

You’re not “rotting” in bed. You’re resting. Your worth isn’t tied to your output or willingness to perform through your pain or exhaustion. So please rest.

What's happening to Prince Harry currently is a graphic illustration of what happens to any survivor or scapegoat who tries to speak out on systems that harmed them. But despite the hostility aimed at him and his chosen family, I hope the Prince will continue to speak.

As we head once again into #MentalHealthAwarenessMonth, use our online checker to see if you could be suffering from Nuclear War: medium.com/@richard-lew...

Finally, the winner of the 2025 Weasel Words Pageant. This just just off the scale shocking.

Any time someone calls you a late bloomer, you want to tell them how much of your life was lost just surviving the soil you were born into.

HBR finds that workplace mental health problems are systemic rather than individualised. No shit. If only HBR could also talk to psychiatry hbr.org/2024/10/why-...

The idea that over-diagnosis of mental disorders is down to a profession that actively campaigns against the medical model is, one feels, wilfully ignorant www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/clinica...

As a 3-5 year old growing up in UK I had a recurring dream in which I was part of a convoy of people moving on foot from one place to another, destination unknown, sometimes walking through squat whitewashed dwellings or camping on beaches. I recently asked an AI to recreate the image from my memory

Anyone else low-key wonder if waking life is just the data-capture phase for the real life, which is lived in sleep via the collective consciousness? #wednesdaythoughts

If someone isn’t trying to shut you down are you even speaking the truth?

If you’re a person who has spent a lot of their life in survival mode, it’s likely you need the reminder: You don’t owe people near what you think you do.

We need more fun and joy in our lives.

It's annoying to almost everybody to be misunderstood or misrepresented-- but to trauma survivors it can be uniquely triggering. We have experience w/ abusers purposefully twisting what we say to manipulate both us & others around us. Our nervous system recognizes that trick.

The fact that they exploited their power over you, whether you were a child or an adult, to hurt you is shameful-- toward them, not you.

« Capricorn: you need to buck up, everyone’s going through a tough time, it’s not just you. » I see my parents started writing my horoscopes 🤷‍♂️

'As soon as one theory is discredited, the advocates of the biological paradigm turn to another, putting forward a new set of ropey, inconclusive and ambiguous studies as putative evidence' (from Chemically Imbalanced). Article by Bruce Levine www.madinamerica.com/2025/03/do-c...

I won't tell you it's risk free to assert yourself. It's not. There are absolutely people who will try to silence & punish you for asserting yourself. There are absolutely risks associated w/ boundaries & self expression. What I will tell you is: those risks are worth taking.

It's not on you to save the people who hurt you, no matter how much you need them to love you. As people get older, they either do the work to take accountability and make right with those around them, or they double down on the wrong position. In that case it's often safer to love them from afar.

Mourn. Don't be ashamed. Don't let anyone shame you for the desire or need to mourn. Whether "they" think your attachment to what or who you lost is legitimate or valid or understandable doesn't matter. Literally couldn't matter less. You get to mourn.

The Defeat Depression Campaign (& other awareness campaigns) set out to persuade the public that emotional reactions were medical conditions requiring drug treatment. Surveys showed previously people viewed emotions as meaningful reactions and were sceptical of using drugs.

Attachment styles are all the rage right now, but the trend seems not to be towards self reflection and an understanding of how attachment injury can be healed, but rather to reify attachment styles as discrete and immutable identities, a movement that to my mind creates less freedom, not more.

1. Another ketamine study that changed the outcome post-hoc. It is the 5th in a row. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Safe secure affordable housing is a mental health intervention.

When a person's expressing real despair- make room for it, don't rush to say something 'positive' or to make it better. Be alongside, listen, let there be space. Aim just to be there- to REALLY be there... Feeling some kind of connection in the most vulnerable of times is worth a hell of a lot.

There’s no listening without empathy, but equally, there’s no empathy without listening ♻️

You were not abused because you were "bad." You do not experience trauma reactions because you are "weak." Recovery is not going slowly because you are "lazy." Trauma Brain is feeding you fake news. Ease up.

We are entering an era where collective action is not only essential and urgent but also feasible and likely. I’m hopeful that the world will ultimately choose community and care over oppression division and hate.

Most clients I see have been harmed or neglected. By people or by systems (familial, educational, spiritual, social, political or economic) designed to keep them anxious, ashamed & diminished. And yet the MH industrial complex still bangs on about genes and neurotransmitters

In any effective psychotherapy, the client's lived experience is more important than my theoretical training, by orders of magnitude. Anyone who suggests the reverse is drawn to the power imbalance inherent in invalidating the vulnerable, not to the job of healer.

Study finds that rooting your problems in within you, via self-diagnosis, rather than understanding them from a more sociologically informed perspective, can be harmful to youth self-esteem. www.madinamerica.com/2023/06/self...

The person has a strong sense of justice, questions the status quo, communicates directly, notices patterns, suggests creative solutions and is capable of deep focus to deliver on them. So clearly defective. Stigmatise them quickly before they build us all a better world 🙄

Why are we pathologising « highly sensitive people » instead of asking what’s missing with those who are insensitive to their environments and the needs of others?

Attachment styles are tendencies not immutable facts. Don’t use them to reduce or minimise a person’s infinite complexity and beauty.

The Insta-therapists’ insistence that every relationship difficulty is narcissistic abuse makes it that much harder for true survivors to be taken seriously

People who use the language of therapy to wound others: 👎👎👎

First can we stop using DEI as an acronym? If you’re talking to me I’m gonna make you say the whole thing, tell me you are against diversity, equity & inclusion so we all know what kind of person you are. #DEI #diversity #equity #inclusion

In this video I talk to Tania at 2 Healing Minds about the Person Centred approach to human distress and how it differs from medical model of “mental illness” youtu.be/pHWSo35JNyU

If you experienced childhood neglect or devaluing then walking away as an adult from someone you love, but who will not or cannot meet your needs, is one of the hardest things to do with confidence. But you know what you need … you got this.

If it was reality, it wouldn’t need promoting or enforcing. What it is is fascism.

Those whose nervous systems are frazzled from what you’ve survived, remember that safe love doesn’t show up as intensity, it shows up as consistency.

Those who take extra time and care to process their experiences may find themselves taken advantage of and, by the time they are sure of what they see, there may be a lot of disrespect to counter. Don’t deplete your energy litigating. They’ve had time to show you who they are. Set the boundary.

“Rising antidepressant prescribing is not associated with an improvement in mental health outcomes at the population level, which, according to some measures, have worsened as antidepressant prescribing has risen.” Our piece in the BMJ: www.bmj.com/content/383/...

The reframing of our natural responses to trauma, stress and abuse as abnormal psychopathology that requires corrective treatment is arguably one of the greatest humanitarian injustices of our time.

The current zeal around the use of hallucinogens as therapeutic agents completely ignores the problem of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (#HPPD), which affects up to 1 in 25 users, is poorly researched and has few treatment options.

When you were given antidepressants to correct your serotonin levels in your brain did anyone do any measurements before you started taking them? Did anyone measure afterwards to see if they’d returned to within normal range?

Abusers always make it a bigger crime to talk about the abuse than to commit the abuse. So if someone is angry about your reaction to their behaviour, you know how to classify them.

Approx 20% of adults in the UK are on antidepressants and they take them in good faith. What they’re not told is that the “largest and longest study ever done to evaluate depression treatment,” was born of scientific misconduct and only showed a 3% stay-well rate after one year.

Now playing: youtu.be/fNAVKTwY1Sk?...

You know you’re healing when you no longer feel the urge to correct people’s misrepresentations of you. Onward.