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Trying to manage your own thoughts, feelings, and actions is work enough. You can’t focus on yourself all the time, but trying manage how other people are in relation to you is hard work too. Here are a few simple tips for being closer to other people when you're recovering from a mental illness.

Where do we learn to drink alcohol? Most people had their first taste of alcohol from one of two places: with their parents or with other people. Innocently, parents give alcohol to children so that they can feel included in adult activities. Sometimes parents use certain alcohol types medicinally, to soothe a baby or put a youngster to bed. Rarely do parents use alcohol abusively with children, though it does happen. By teenagehood, friends and peers either of the same age or an older age begin experimenting with alcohol. After not having been given any idea what the substance is like, their curiosity gets the better of them. Some teens experiment recreationally while others experiment more abusively. Recent research reveals that the type of drinking one does correlates with how they were introduced to alcohol. Published in the journal Psychological Medicine, the report found the difference. On the one hand, children who first had alcohol with their parents were more likely to be drinkers by the ages of fifteen and sixteen. Drinking meant to this study that the teenager was consuming full servings of alcohol, not just small samples or sips. On the other hand, children who first had alcohol from their friends were more likely to binge drink. In summary, young alcohol experimentation still leads to full alcohol experimentation in teenagehood, the manner of which, is dependent.

Alcohol is not a liquid which goes into our bodies and then just leaves. People are not commonly mindful of how what they put in their body actually affects their body. Here are some of the ways alcohol abuse can affect the physical body.

Avalon By The Sea is a certified dual diagnosis treatment center, providing primary care for mental health disorders when they are a primary diagnosis as well as a co-occurring disorder. For a confidential assessment and more information on our programs, call 1 888-958-7511.

Having a smartphone, computer, or other technological device to turn to for distraction can feel like both a saving grace and a detriment when you are living with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Apps and websites give you a thousand things to do at a time and bounce between as your fleeting attention seems fit. However, part of living with ADHD means learning how to create productivity in your life. Technology can become a distraction when it gets in the way of your ability to stick to normal routines and get things done during the day. You might be struggling with technology distraction if these things happen:

Eating disorders can be life threatening and cause ongoing health complications without recovery. Recovering from an eating disorder is tedious because it involves something that every human needs to survive- food. Most of the world struggles with insecurities about food and body image. It is easy to project that onto someone who is struggling with an eating disorder. Here is a quick guide of what not to say, even when you might be thinking it:

Therapy usually comes with a negative connotation for people. Spending money on time reserved for talking about your feelings or difficult things in the past sounds unappealing. However, immense healing can occur in therapy, helping someone to feel more free in their life.

Soon, prescription MDMA and therapeutic treatment using MDMA will be legal. MDMA is also known as ecstasy, a drug which finds most use in clubs, raves, and music festivals.

Not all abuse is physical. Neglect is a form of abuse. Childhood emotional neglect is an experience shared by millions of children and adult children around the world. Parents who were not taught how to be emotionally intimate, have a mental health disorder, are addicts or alcoholics, or are otherwise compromised in some way hold back their emotional connections. Childhood emotional neglect usually means someone has not received the kind of emotional attention and intimacy as a child they were in need of. Feeling heard, acknowledged, and validated is essential for a child’s positive development and growth. Additionally, a child needs to not only be met in their emotional states but responded to with emotions as well. Not receiving emotions from a parent is crushing to a child who isn’t old enough to understand the complexities of holding back emotions.

Being in any kind of a relationship with a narcissist can be trying. Narcissism is both appealing and unappealing for many reasons. If you are worried there is a narcissist in your life who needs help managing their mental illness, look for these signs. Without treatment, a narcissist can hurt people they love and destroy relationships, even when they don’t want to.

It’s 3 a.m. You’ve been soundly asleep, safely dreaming, when all of a sudden you’re woken up with a fright. A smoke alarm in your house is going off. A thousand thoughts run through your mind about your house burning down, the safety of others in the home, and your safety as well. You realize, you could die, but there isn’t much time for that thought. Your heart starts racing, your body goes into action, and you’re responding the emergency. Frantically, you find that there is no fire. All that reaction was for naught. After checking the house, you go back to bed and eventually fall back asleep. Panic attacks are a similar scenario, only, there’s no fire alarm. There’s not even a fire. Without a single trigger, the panic attack sets in, setting off all the same symptoms, and worse. Each day, people living with panic disorder fear the onset of a panic attack which is unpredictable and sometime unmanageable. Instead of worrying about everyone else, a panic attack has but one focus: the fear of dying. For about twenty minutes, the brain is convinced not that it is going to die, but that it is already dying. Increased heart rate, dizziness, stomach cramps, shortness of breath, and high emotions all accompany a panic attack. After twenty minutes, everything suddenly subsides, leaving the individual exhausted. Witnessing a panic attack as a loved one of someone with panic disorder can feel helpless. All help is not lost. Here are some suggestions for supporting a loved one through a panic attack.

At one point of time or another in our lives, we all experience symptoms of depression. Depression should be a passing phase which brings in its heavy rainstorms and then leaves behind a beautiful rainbow. For just less than 10 percent of the population, that rainbow will not come for some time. There is a difference between experiencing depression and being diagnosably depressed. For chronic depression, which is a clinical level of depression, the symptoms are ongoing and interfere with quality of life. Here are some signs and symptoms which might indicate that what you are going through is more than an extended case of bad emotional weather but a deeper problem needing professional treatment.