Can anyone relate to this? I drastically overexaggerated my purging and probably downplayed the restricting.

Anyone?

to bring to the support group at the hospital tomorrow night… but I’m exhausted and don’t want to. It’s been a very lazy Sunday

Anyone want to make a flyer for me? Anyone?

smiliu:

[Article of Interest] National Institute of Mental Health Abandoning the DSM
by Vaughan Bell

In a potentially seismic move, the National Institute of Mental Health – the world’s biggest mental health research funder, has announced only two weeks before the launch of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual that it will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories”.
In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity and that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”.
This is something that will make very uncomfortable reading for the American Psychiatric Association as they trumpet what they claim is the ‘future of psychiatric diagnosis’ only two weeks before it hits the shelves.
As a result the NIMH will now be preferentially funding research that does not stick to DSM categories:
Going forward, we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system. What does this mean for applicants? Clinical trials might study all patients in a mood clinic rather than those meeting strict major depressive disorder criteria. Studies of biomarkers for “depression” might begin by looking across many disorders with anhedonia or emotional appraisal bias or psychomotor retardation to understand the circuitry underlying these symptoms. What does this mean for patients? We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system.
As an alternative approach, Insel suggests the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, which aims to uncover what it sees as the ‘component parts’ of psychological dysregulation by understanding difficulties in terms of cognitive, neural and genetic differences.
For example, difficulties with regulating the arousal system might be equally as involved in generating anxiety in PTSD as generating manic states in bipolar disorder.
Of course, this ‘component part’ approach is already a large part of mental health research but the RDoC project aims to combine this into a system that allows these to be mapped out and integrated.
It’s worth saying that this won’t be changing how psychiatrists treat their patients any time soon. DSM-style disorders will still be the order of the day, not least because a great deal of the evidence for the effectiveness of medication is based on giving people standard diagnoses.
It is also true to say that RDoC is currently little more than a plan at the moment – a bit like the Mars mission: you can see how it would be feasible but actually getting there seems a long way off. In fact, until now, the RDoC project has largely been considered to be an experimental project in thinking up alternative approaches.
The project was partly thought to be radical because it has many similarities to the approach taken by scientific critics of mainstream psychiatry who have argued for a symptom-based approach to understanding mental health difficulties that has often been rejected by the ‘diagnoses represent distinct diseases’ camp.
The NIMH has often been one of the most staunch supporters of the latter view, so the fact that it has put the RDoC front and centre is not only a slap in the face for the American Psychiatric Association and the DSM, it also heralds a massive change in how we might think of mental disorders in decades to come.

(via neonwarholrainbowrocket)

When my friend Amanda said this, I knew it was true. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that TRUE recovery is never really discussed in “recovery” books. People tend to tell their stories, describe how they fell apart and then, in a chapter, tell us it was hard but worth it. But what really happens? How do you go from toeing the line of life or death to a beautiful healthy life?

They don’t tell you just how hard it is. They don’t tell you about waking up drenched in sweat in the middle of the night. They don’t tell you that you may inexplicably crave oreos at two o’clock in the morning. They don’t tell you how uncomfortable the weight gain is until it finally redistributes to where we wish the weight would go. They don’t tell you that the weight may never redistribute the way we wish it would. They don’t tell you that you wonder if you should give up every day. They don’t tell you about having to face the real issues that you’ve spent a year or five or twenty trying to avoid. They don’t tell you how scary it is to feel as if the biggest part of your identity is now a gaping hole, a void in your existence that seems near impossible to fill.

Why don’t they tell you these things? Maybe they’re afraid of scaring people away from recovery and back into their eating disorders. Maybe the entire thing is just a blur to most people. I wish I had known these things going into recovery, but not for the reasons most people think. I wish I had known so I hadn’t thought I was failing at recovery throughout the entire process. I wish I had known the details so I could see that it would end, that it wasn’t an eternal life of contemplation and a war with yourself. Had I known that the inner struggle would end one day, maybe I would have been more willing to sit through feeling “fat;” maybe I would have been willing to let myself cry about the traumas I never dealt with; maybe I would have fought those seemingly endless thoughts about giving up; maybe I would have spent more time trying to create a new person that I wanted to be rather than assume that my eating disorder was all I could be.

I’m here to tell you the reality of an eating disorder. I’m here to tell you that there are many uncomfortable moments, many moments you’ll want to give up and go back to the disorder, many moments that you feel like the only good part of you that you ever had was your disorder. Yes, there will be many of these moments, but they are not endless. Once you begin to fill in the void that the eating disorder once resided in, the uncomfortableness  begins to subside and you begin to feel comfortable in your own skin. You realize that life is more than the disorder, but you can’t make that realization if you give up before you’re even half way through.

I’m here to tell you the things that no one tells you about recovery. They don’t tell you that, by the end of this journey, you’ll get to know yourself better than most people get to know themselves in a life time. They don’t tell you how wonderful it feels to find inner peace. They don’t tell you how incredible it is to force that formerly negative energy into something positive and productive. They don’t tell you how amazing it feels to be alive.

You have to take the bad with the good and realize that if you push through that struggle, it does end. It hurts like hell to break free but once you do, there’s life outside of the thin cage. There’s life outside of the head you’ve been stuck in for all this time. But you have to close the door on the life you’ve lived for so long before the door to a new life can finally open. It’s a leap of faith, but it is absolutely a leap worth taking.

For my U.S. followers: go sign this! Help eating disordered patients get fair coverage and prevent denial of coverage. It only takes a minute to sign this and it could make a huge difference!

alexaarae:

I just want you to know: you are doing the right thing by choosing recovery.

(via findinghappinessandhealth)

Positive?

I’m having trouble grounding myself on this one. I spent over an hour today looking at pictures of the “sick” girls on Tumblr and that I was with in treatment, and all of a sudden I’m thinking about my lowest weight and realizing it wasn’t very low at all.

Help with some thoughts to counter this negative thought please?

From a friend on Facebook. It was just too amazing and powerful to not share it.

but I’m not here. I’m not in this moment, I’m not present. I haven’t been in months.

I remember the last time I really felt here. I was at that stupid heavy metal concert the night I got out of the emergency room. I was afraid to go because of the pounding migraine that had landed me in the emergency room just hours before, but I braced myself, put a cute outfit on and went. It was as if the blaring music and screaming of eccentric fans kept me grounded, as if the loud noise was enough to force me to be here,to be in the moment.

Since that day, I’ve felt like an empty shell. I can hold conversation, I can laugh and smile, I can cry…but none of it feels as if I’m experiencing it. The past few months have been a blur of experiences I’m incapable of connecting to and I’m not quite sure where I’ve gone. Why can’t I connect to the world in which I live, the people I love? Why do I have this everlasting feeling of loneliness that seems to be eating me alive?

I’m lonely in a crowded room. I’m speaking without thinking, hearing without listening, viewing without seeing. Nothing seems to process anymore. I can sit next to boyfriend for hours and for some reason have trouble conceptualizing his existence. I feel like I’ve lost it and I’m not sure what to do. I feel psychotic, neurotic and terribly afraid.

Why can’t I come out of this? It used to be that once I realized I wasn’t here, I could find solid ground. Now I realize it, I try and I fail to bring myself back to reality. Am I losing my mind?

I just want to feel alive again.