After months of disturbing online and real-life incidences, actress Amanda Bynes was taken into custody Thursday night and ordered to have a psychiatric evaluation. Bynes was arrested earlier in the evening after she threw a bong out the window, prompting a neighbor to call the police. NYC police charged her with reckless endangerment, and took her to Roosevelt Hospital for an evaluation. After the evaluation, she was booked at a Midtown police station. Keep reading »
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski has opened up about an eating disorder she has struggled with throughout her life: exercise bulimia — a compulsion to binge eat food and then overexercise to burn off the calories.
People with exercise bulimia will exercise several times a day, multiple days a week even when they’re sick or injured. They’ll blow off other responsibilities to exercise and get panicky or depressed when they can’t work out. Not surprisingly, they’re very focused on their appearance and self-critical, particularly in regards to how much food they have eaten and think they need to burn off. (Unlike with regular bulimia, they don’t make themselves vomit.) As explained by ULifeline.org:
People with exercise bulimia are obsessed with exercise and often binge. Bingeing is when someone eats large quantities of food in a short amount of time. … Exercise bulimia has dangerous complications, including depression, injury, weak bones, reproductive problems and even cardiac arrest. Keep reading »
First there was the horrific attack at the Boston Marathon, followed closely by news of multiple poison-laced letters sent to Washington, DC. Yesterday, we saw the Senate ignore the pleas of 90 percent of the population and vote to protect the NRA, and last night, we all watched as a fertilizer plant in Texas erupted in a deadly fireball. Even if you were nowhere near the actual disasters, chances are you’ve felt a great deal of fear, sadness, and confusion in recent days. It’s been a rough week, to say the least. The rest of The Frisky staff and I wanted to put together a list of small ways to help us all get through this intense time. Please feel free to add your own tips in the comment section, and here’s to a calmer weekend… Keep reading »
This piece was cross-posted with permission from the Ms. Magazine Blog.
On Tuesday, Mother Jones released an audio recording of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaking with members of his reelection staff. Much of the conversation focused on actor Ashley Judd, who, until recently, was rumored to be mulling a run against the current Senate GOP leader. For the most part, the recording is typical opposition research. An aide rehearses Judd’s public politics: She loves Obamacare, is pro-gay marriage and self-identifies as a feminist.
None of this, of course, is much of a surprise — Judd campaigned for President Obama and has spoken publicly on behalf of NARAL Pro-Choice America. More disconcerting than the rehashing of Judd’s political ideology, however, is when the discussion veers from policy to Judd’s reproductive choices and then quickly to her mental health. Keep reading »
It was a workday of minor annoyances. Everything at my temp job had gone normally, except for a snippy email from IT and a laminator malfunction that forced me to dig out a half-laminated page with a fork.
So why was I crouched in a bathroom stall, hyperventilating, sobbing, and trying not to scream?
A coworker insisted I see a doctor, who said my meltdown was probably due to anxiety and depression. I was shaken – but not entirely surprised.
I was born and raised in a majority-Asian community in Hawaii, where mental health issues are not discussed. Granted, since most of the people in that community are second- to fourth-generation Asians, there are some exceptions, although these exceptions are determined by an unspoken code. (It has to be an unspoken code. If you can’t discuss mental health, you can’t discuss discussing mental health, either.) As far as I can figure, you get a pass if you’ve tried to kill yourself or at least been hospitalized. Anything else is something that you just get over eventually. Don’t dwell on your emotions all the time. We must endure. That was the message. Keep reading »
I was going to try and pick out one or two quotes from this clip of Jennifer Lawrence doing post-Oscars interviews, but it was pretty impossible to choose just one thing. Aside from being gorgeous and talented and all over amazing, J. Law happens to also be extremely thoughtful and funny. After discussing the stigma around mental health vis a vis her movie “Silver Linings Playbook,” Lawrence admitted that she’d done a shot backstage and made fun of herself for falling while trying to collect her awards. This clip confirms that she is probably the most hilarious person to hang out with in Hollywood, by a mile. [Yahoo]
Greetings from zombie-land.
That’s where I’m currently residing as I go through antidepressant withdrawal. It’s a horribly dizzying place, filled with bouts of insomnia, nausea and an episode of neverending flu. It’s not a place I recommend visiting, and yet, I’ve found myself here because I decided to get off of Paxil, the anti-anxiety drug I’ve been on–off and on–for the last 10 years. And let me tell you, withdrawal is a bitch. Keep reading »
So, it has come to this. Facebook can be an indicator of your psychological state, says a new study done at the University of Missouri. More than 200 college students were asked to print out their Facebook activity and given the option to redact anything they chose from their timeline. The portions that they concealed were just as psychologically revealing as what they opted to share, the researchers found.
“The Internet is novel way to study human psychology because it can ameliorate some of the self-report biases associated with paper-and-pencil reports … Because of the real or imagined perception of anonymity, the Internet may allow unique access to the psyche,” said researcher Elizabeth Martin.
The mental health “findings” ranged from social anhedonia –people with a reduced desire to interact with others — to paranoia. Although therapists aren’t currently using Facebook as a diagnostic tool, they may start doing so in the future. Great. There’s no safe place to be crazy anymore. I wonder what it means if I post mostly stuff that I wrote on my timeline. That I’m a narcissist? [Mashable]
Yet another reason diet soda may not be as good a choice as you assumed: A new study links it to an increased risk of depression, LiveScience reports. More than 263,900 US adults answered questions about their beverage consumption between 1995 and 1996, and about 10 years later, they were asked if they had been diagnosed with depression since the year 2000. Those who regularly consumed four or more cans per day of any type of soda were 30 percent more likely to have been diagnosed with depression, but those who chose diet soda saw a 31% increased risk compared to just 22% for regular-soda-drinkers. Read more…
The irony about people who cope with depression is that some of us are actually quite happy people. We are not, contrary to stereotype, slogging through life with the weight of one thousand sorrows dragging behind us. I may feel things intensely, sure. But I’m not someone whose blue-colored glasses see everyone screwed up and the world a terrible place.
That is, until the holidays come around. Keep reading »
The Frisky is a member of Spin Entertainment, a division of SpinMedia
Home | Contact SpinMedia | Contact The Frisky | About | Submissions | Frisky Friends | Advertise | Press | RSS | Terms of Use |
Privacy Policy | Mobile | 
