Mental Health

Should I Be Fighting Mental Health Stigma? NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness created a list of nine suggestions for fighting mental health stigma. Here we will discuss 7 of the ways you can fight mental health stigma every day. There are no requirements or certifications for being an advocate to someone with a mental health issue. Mental illness does not make someone different or less deserving of a quality life, fair treatment, or respect. Stand up for your loved one today, and people all over the world living through mental illness.

Should you stay in contact with an ex-partner when entering treatment for mental health or substance use disorder issues? For most the immediate answer is a resounding, “NO.” Many come to terms with their need for treatment on the tail ends of a recently ended or ending relationship. Different mental health disorders can treat relationships in different ways. From codependency, to dependency, to avoidance, to abuse, relationships can cause both positive and negative effects. Treatment is a time to focus on taking care of yourself and primarily your relationship with yourself. A relationship with a partner might be over for good. Treatment is the perfect time to work with individual and group therapists to process the breakup and relationship. Treatment is not the time to try and focus on getting back together with someone who is unhealthy, abusive, or encouraging of you to continue using drugs and alcohol. Once cell phone privileges are restored, it can be tempting to engage in “exting”. Exting is texting an ex-partner for a myriad of reasons. Before pressing send, try this mindfulness practice to check your motives. Pause. Close your eyes. Breathe. Before doing anything, take a moment to center and ground yourself in the present moment. It’s easy to get swept up in nostalgia for the past or desires for the future. Finding yourself in the present moment will help you better analyze what your true initiative is for reaching out to your ex-partner. Do A Self-Check. Ask yourself, am I feeling lonely? Am I uncomfortable because I am feeling lonely? What are my expectations for my ex-partner’s response? Am I expecting the to make me feel better? If you are in a new relationship, or even examining the status of your new relationship with yourself ask how that relationship is going. A struggle might indicate why you’d seek out something familiar. Evaluate Their Life. Have they moved on? If they are in a new relationship has it gotten serious? When your relationship ended, did they make it clear you weren’t to speak again? Have all your physical needs been settled (i.e. separating of stuff, paperwork, etc.)? Would it be disruptive to their lives to start communicating with them? Some relationships need mending. For relationships that haven’t ended, couples counseling and relationship counseling can be beneficial. When one partner enters treatment, the other often enters their own kind of recovery. Together, through emotional, spiritual, and therapeutic work, a whole new relationship can be born. Avalon By The Sea offers relationship and couples therapy as part of both our mental health and substance use disorder treatment programs. Getting over a relationship and getting through a relationship are both hard challenges to overcome alone. Our trained and qualified staff provide evidence based therapy methods for working with couples and helping you build a new relationship with You. Call us today for a confidential assessment and more information on our treatment programs, 1-855-464-8492.

Music is arguably one of the best non prescription medications in the world. We identify with the sounds, the words, the tempos. Music speaks a language that is recognized from the very cellular makeup of our being. We listen for what we like in music. Often, we escape. Music is listened to most often as a whole, rather than for its individual parts. The brain is relatively lazy, not paying attention to what it doesn’t have to. However, bringing mindfulness into music listening can create a whole new experience. Here are some tips for mindful music listening

Therapy doesn’t help everyone. For some, taking action is more effective than words. For others, “talking it out” is the most beneficial practice. Pharmaceutical treatments like anti anxiety medications can help in staving off symptoms; unfortunately, they are not preventative treatments. Therapeutic methods are evidence-based, meaning they have been found evident to effectively prevent the onset of anxiety. The work doesn’t end in the therapist’s office or when you leave the didactic lecture in treatment. Evidence based treatment methods require daily practice and committed work. Doing the work provided by therapeutic methods is more than emotional, it is neurobiological. Through incremental changes on a daily basis, you can actually reprogram the way your brain functions, including anxious reactions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT has been a highly acclaimed practice for mental health recovery treatment since its foundation in the 1980’s. How CBT works is explained in its name. Seeking transform cognitive activity and function, CBT is a process of noticing one’s thoughts and taking action to reframe them or repurpose them. For an anxious thinker who is usually in a doomsday cycle of thinking this can be incredibly beneficial. Watching your own cognitive behavior, you learn to notice the onset of anxiety, eventually being able to pinpoint the triggers which cause it. Anxiety is full of assumptions, usually assumptions indicating the worst. Through CBT you are able to change the directions of those thoughts from hopeless to hopeful. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy are similar in that both include the noticing of thoughts in order to change them. While CBT takes a more proactive approach to evaluating and changing thought processes, MBSR is simply about noticing the thought. When anxiety gets going, it can feel like it’s running a thousand feet per second. Feeling and thinking so much at such a rapid pace can be overwhelming. Feeling out of control of one’s own thoughts only makes anxiety worse. Acknowledging each thought or even each stream of thought as just that- thought- helps create calm. Separating fact from fiction, perception from the possible, MBSR helps to see each thought as a passing experience rather than a defining realization. Anxiety disorders can feel like being on a train with no breaks. Learning to manage your emotions and thinking is just one part of recovery for mental health. Avalon By The Sea of Malibu is one of California’s premiere treatment centers offering mental health treatment for primary psychiatric diagnoses. Our comprehensive program combines therapeutic methods with mindfulness methods and more. For a confidential and professional assessment, call 1-855-464-8492.

Depression is a leading mental health condition globally. The World Health Organization estimates 350 million people are affected by depression. Depression is more than the average case of sadness or even grief. Enduring symptoms of low emotional states can lead to health problems, substance abuse, and in extreme cases, suicide. 800,000 people die from suicide worldwide each year. Depression is a leading cause. In some countries, WHO reports, less than 10% of those affected by Depression receive any treatment for it. Many cases of depression are treated with a combination of psychotherapy and pharmaceutical treatment. SSRIs and antidepressants are leading methods for pharmaceutical treatment of depression. However, each case of depression is incredibly unique. So far there is not one pill to cure all depression. Depression could be seen as a worldwide public mental health epidemic. For the hundreds of millions suffering around the world there are only few treatment methods available. In response, the scientific community is dedicated to finding new and effective methods for treating depression- some of which might seem out of the box. Recent years have seen claims for using psychoactive drugs to treat depression. MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is a club drug known for heightening sensations, creating a state of euphoria, and enhancing feelings of happiness as well as love. The FDA has hinted at a prescription grade MDMA to be available for public use in the near future, but developments have not been reported to have continued thus far. When psychedelic drugs were taking the world by storm in the 1960’s, doctors saw positive results in the use of psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms”. In controlled doses and under controlled conditions, doctors can use the “mind opening” drugs to help depressed patients experience the world in a different way. Most recently, doctors are claiming that Ketamine might be an effective treatment for depression. Popular in asian countries, especially in the nightclub scene, ketamine is a dissociative drug. Falling into the “k-hole”, recreational users of the drugs experience a detachment from their physical and psychological selves. Ketamine has “basically revolutionized how we think about depression,” claims Christine Denny, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in an interview with Business Insider. Rather than using ketamine to directly treat depression, it is being used as a preventative treatment. States the article, “protecting against depression or potentially stopping other stress-related disorders in the first place is a whole new thing and could have profound, long-lasting effects.” Avalon By The Sea is one of California’s only treatment facilities licensed to treat psychiatric mental health disorders as a primary diagnosis. Providing exceptional quality care, Avalon provides comprehensive treatment in a luxury and relaxing environment. For a confidential and professional assessment and more information on our programs of treatment, please call 1-855-464-8492.

Empathy is an important human trait because it is one that makes us more human. The greatest illusion in all humanity is the idea of separation. Due to what we are taught, we come to believe that there is something about us that makes us different from other human beings. Worse, in some cases we are taught that those differences make us better than or worse than others. According to whether you are better than or worse than someone else are certain behaviors and mindsets, ways that you should act. One piece at a time, you disconnect yourself from the very thing that connects you to everyone: your humanity. No matter our race, socioeconomic class, mental health diagnosis, substance of choice, past, future, language, or job title- we are all human beings. As a result, we all experience emotion. Most humans will experience pain, suffering, and joy within their lifetimes. Empathy is our way to show one another understanding and share in their emotional experiences with them. Few feelings are worse than thinking one is completely isolated in their experience. Loneliness has been scientifically proven to worsen degenerative disease like dementia and cancer. Some people with clinical psychiatric diagnoses such as psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder, also known as sociopathy, are constitutionally incapable of feeling empathy for others. For the rest of us, however, feeling and practicing empathy is entirely possible. Though it may not be first nature, through a little bit of work, it can become an entire way of life. Be Of Service The more we are involved with other people, the more we can come to understand them. Helping others is a way to connect with another person’s life, life story, and experience. Volunteering to work with other people, children, or the elderly is a way to be of service. Empathy can also be practiced through service in daily situations. Watch for opportunities to help. You might find you recognize more people needing help then you realized. Everyone needs help. Listen More Deeply How many times have we listened to a friend on the phone while thinking about something completely different? We might have more empathy toward their situation if we really paid attention and realized we can relate to what they are saying. The truth is, people are telling us exactly what is going on all the time. Often, we’re too self-focused to pay attention. Actively listen to what someone is saying to you when they speak. Ask them for clarity if you aren’t sure what they are trying to communicate. Avalon By The Sea instills spiritual values like empathy and compassion into the core components of our treatment programs for substance use disorders and mental health disorders. For a confidential assessment and more information on our treatment programs, call 1 (888) 958-7511.

Throughout recovery we learn about the importance of communication, articulating our feelings, and asking for our needs to be met. We’re told we, like other humans, deserve to have our needs met. What exactly are these needs? As human beings we have a few basic needs to survive, like food, water, and shelter. If these needs are met regularly we have a better chance at living. There are other needs humans need that come next. Needs like love, support, encouragement, and validation, are needs humans need for development. Many of us grew up without these needs being met by our parents, family members, and other people in our lives. It’s hard to survive without food, water, and shelter. To live without love and support, we turned to other means of survival, like drugs and alcohol or other harmful behaviors. Substances helped us fulfill those needs or feel like we didn’t have them at all. When we let go of the harmful substances in our lives to turn to recovery, we find we have always been in need, that substances never really fulfilled the need, and we are still in need. Reconciling with these needs is challenging, especially when it requires the use of an emotional vocabulary we are just starting to learn. Afraid of confrontation, rejection, or being left without our needs yet once more, we often continue to suffer, shying away from any opportunity to assert ourselves. Look to some of these tips for encouragement and guidance.

Whether it is a substance use disorder, a personality disorder, a psychiatric disorder, or an eating disorder, this “other” part of ourselves can start to feel like its own person. There are, of course, mental health disorders in which one does have multiple friends or personalities living within their minds. For most, however, their disorders take on their own kind of personality. Our depression can feel like the friend that never leaves. Our anxiety can feel like the friend who never shuts up. Our eating disorders can feel like our greatest, yet most sadistic, coach, telling us we can achieve something if we put our minds to it. Our substance abuse disorders can tell us we aren’t alone and that we’ll never be disappointed. Any of our disorders might end up telling us, they’re the only friend we need. When we choose to get sober or seek treatment for mental health, there is a peculiar feeling of guilt. We might feel as though we are abandoning someone who has been there for us for so long. Long ago we stopped separating our disorders from ourselves. At once, we need to embrace our disorders as part of us, yet at the same time we need to separate. We might not have known what our diagnosis was or how to tell what was the “real” us from our symptoms. You are not your disorder. By taking the measures to seek treatment and help, you are already recognizing that you see the potential for more or for different in your life. Symptoms are only symptoms, they are not traits of character, and they are certainly not incriminations. Through treatment you will learn to understand, assess, and manage your symptoms as they come. Letting Go With Gratitude There’s a chance we’re angry with our disorder, or angry with ourselves for having one. For years, we’ve suffered, and felt unable to get on the other side. Anger is a natural phase of the grieving process. Yes, sometimes approaching our disorders and learning to work through them feels like grief. We’ll experience sadness and we’ll try to negotiate a way to keep some of it. Ultimately, we will find gratitude for our experience. It brought us to this point, has taught us a lot, and above all else, showed us what we were capable of living with. Avalon By The Sea is certified to treat both substance use disorders and psychiatric disorders as primary diagnosis. That means we offer an unparalleled clinical approach to mental health, while incorporating a holistic treatment plan for healing mind, body, and spirit. For more information on our treatment programs, call 1 (888) 958-7511 today

Histrionic personality disorder is not exclusive to females or any stereotype of the female personality. However, the disorder is comparative to the characteristics of the highly emotional, attention seeking archetypes so often heard about. Characterized by being (and needing to be) the center of attention, histrionic personality disorder can drive people to extreme lengths to be noticed. It isn’t about the fame or reputation. Histrionic personality disorder is a disorder of insecurity and a lack of self-knowledge. Attention and approval from others is what gives someone with histrionic personality disorder a sense of self-esteem. Indeed, many star performers who fit the stereotype of a “diva” or a “drama queen” might be suffering from histrionic personality disorder. Without a platform, stage, or fan base, they fall apart in their identity. Fame is all they’ve ever wanted, yet they find it is not enough to fill that hole. Being the center of attention is not everything. Being yourself is. For histrionic personality disorder, this is hard knowledge to come by. Other Personality Traits of Histrionic Personality Disorder There is always one person who seems to go out of their way to get attention through outlandish behaviors, dangerous actions, or provocative dress. Provocative behavior is a symptom of histrionic personality disorder. Winning the seduction game is important because it guarantees attention. Dressing, acting, and behaving in seductive manners are all part of the need to be the center of attention. Seductive or sexual provocation is not appropriate in all social situations. Histrionic personality disorder sees those inappropriate situations as perfect opportunities. Such opportunities are likely to be taken, especially if others are taking it. Due to a lack of self-identity and self-esteem, histrionic personality disorder is prone to being encouraged to engage in other attention seeking behaviors. Vulnerable to influence and suggestion, if there is a promise of attention or validation, histrionic personality disorder will not need much convincing. Who Has Histrionic Personality Disorder? Women are diagnosed with HPD more often than men if only because, as Psychology Today describes, “because attention seeking and sexual forwardness are less socially acceptable for women than for men.” Histrionic personality disorder can be a high functioning disorder meaning an individual can be successful in life without evidence of an issue. If you or a loved one are concerned that attention-seeking behavior might be causing harm or impairing quality of life, call Avalon By The Sea today. One of California’s few licensed facilities for treating mental health as a primary diagnosis, Avalon is able to provide intensive psychiatric treatment. The risky behaviors of histrionic personality disorder can include drug use. Avalon also offers substance abuse treatment programs. To receive a confidential assessment and learn more about how we can customize a program of treatment for you, call 1-855-464-8492.

Treatment for recovery from alcoholism, addiction, and co-occurring mental health disorders require change. Commonly it is quipped in sober support meetings not to worry about anything, “because all you have to change is everything.” Change is daunting. It’s our human desire to have a grounded constant in our lives, an anchor to weather the unpredictable storms of life. Though it might sound philosophical, the very real truth is this: change is the only constant. Even within our own bodies, on a cellular level, change is occurring constantly- as in every couple of days. Ironically, we often seek treatment because we need a change in our lives. We cannot continue living the way we have been. Yet, once we get to treatment and realize the amount of work and change we are about to endure, we become very unsettled. Despite the ongoing pain and danger our old way of life was providing us, the sickness and desperation, we start to think it wasn’t so bad. Change is a challenge. Learning to live with changes and make changes is really about learning to live “life on life’s terms” as it is often described. Why is it we resist the very thing we are most natural at adapting to? Psychologists argue it's a combination of character and patterns of behavior. Anxiety Having a chronic sense of worry or concern can make change terrifying. Endless “what if’s” stem from change. Control Control helps us feel like we have command over life. Everything can work in our favor the way we perceive we need it to as long as we are in control. Routine Mostly we fear the unknown because of a lack of security. Routine brings us security. When our routines are consistent, we don’t need to have expectations of ambiguity. Stress When security is threatened, one’s very feelings of survival can feel threatened. Stress is a natural response to the threat of survival. Short-Sightedness Being wrapped up in a routine isn’t the same as being present, but it's a way of being locked out of the future. Psychologists have found that for some, the future is hard to conceptualize, making it difficult to choose or adapt to something today that is not for certain tomorrow. The greatest change you can make in your life is you. Treatment will bring out the best you you have ever had the chance to know. That is our goal at Avalon By The Sea. Our treatment programs for substance use and mental health disorders are focused on helping you make the necessary changes in your life. For a confidential assessment or more information, call 1-888-958-7511.

Depression is a psychological condition that affects millions of people in the United States each year. The National Center for Health Statistics notes the 7.6 percent of the population over the age of 12 experiences depression in any 2-week period1. The causes and conditions that surround depression are varied and complex. Fortunately, a variety of treatments are available to help people manage this troubling condition.

Transitioning back into everyday life is a challenge after being in the routine, safety, and comfort of treatment. If you are doing a step down process, you will have outpatient or aftercare services where you can continue to check in with a professional staff as well as your recovery peers. Remember that you are capable of handling life on life’s terms. Examine Your Job Some of us left jobs behind to seek treatment and have the opportunity to return to them. Others did not have jobs and are now able to seek out part time or full time employment as a result of recovery. Work is where we end up spending a majority of our time unless we have a special schedule or are retired. It is important for your work environment to be conducive to your mental health. Though the economy is struggling and jobs are hard, you must trust that your mental wellness is more important than this job. If you are experiencing stress, abuse, emotional distress, or not enough opportunities to take breaks and take care of yourself, it might be time to look for another job. You deserve to be in a place where you feel okay. Your job life can have a ripple effect on the rest of your life. Treatment was hard work and you went through a lot to get here. If necessary, move forward from this job, career, or company, to another one. Examine Your Environment After treatment, sometimes home doesn’t feel like home anymore. We might have left behind a path of destruction or many memories of a painful past. Cleaning up the wreckage is part of our recovery, but we also have the right to move forward from our environment to start fresh. Moving forward from your last home life before treatment can take a few different forms. You can: Move entirely Move to a different area of the same town Do a deep cleaning and get rid of triggering things Redecorate Repaint Remodel Small changes can make a big impact in the home. Paint color can change the tone of the house. A new bedset can completely change the mood of the room. Ultimately, the way your house looks does not dictate your emotions. However, it can help you to feel more welcomed, safe, and secure, when you get home each day. Examine Your Feelings Treatment for mental illness has taught you how to identify, communicate, and manage your emotions. A drastic move or career change might not be the best idea. Before making any major decisions, take time to mindfully check in with yourself to see what might be coming up. Avalon By The Sea is Southern California’s premiere mental health treatment facility and one of the only licensed centers for treating psychiatric issues as a primary diagnosis. We offer excellent aftercare and transitional services to our clients to ensure that their transition back into life after treatment is as seamless as possible. For a confidential assessment or more information about our mental health treatment program, call 1-855-464-8409.