If you go to an addiction treatment program built around the needs of a dual diagnosis patient, the treatment is designed to treat the most pressing issues first. That means it will tackle physical reliance on the substance, and behaviors that present a risk to mental and physical health, and then start on treating behaviors and attitudes that get in the way of treatment.

That means:

How does that work? If you’re completely overwhelmed by anxiety or depression, or in the middle of a manic episode because of bipolar disorder, you don’t have the resources to concentrate on therapy or to make meaningful steps to change. This means that it will be crucial to recognize where you’re at and what your capabilities are and then use treatment to bring you to a point where you can benefit from addiction treatment and therapy.

Treating a mental health disorder means having space to change your behavior and your life outlook. Sometimes it means getting medication and treatment. At the same time, you’ll have to treat a substance use disorder at the same time, because aspects of a substance use disorder can get in the way of treatment. However, once you get over the initial barrier of needing to be clean and sober and motivated, you’ll often find that many of the tools for mental health treatment help with recovery and vice-versa. That means you’ll have treatment for mental health that contributes to your recovery and structure for recovery that contributes to mental health. So, while co-occurring disorders can get in the way of recovery, once you get started, treating both at the same time just makes sense.

If you need help, it’s important to talk to your doctor, be upfront about any mental health disorders or diagnoses, and get the full help you need – for both mental health problems and substance use disorder, even if you don’t yet have a diagnosis for both.

There are a lot of personality type systems that we use today. Myers-Briggs is the most common in business settings.

We’ll take a look at the big three here: ABCD Type Model:

This model organizes people into four personality types:

You probably know this model from memes about Type A.

Myers-Briggs

Myers-Briggs uses 8 personality points to map people into 16 different personality types.

The idea of this personality test (the 16 types or Myers-Briggs Personality Test / MBTI) is that everyone leans more to one or the other of the opposed personality traits. Everyone has all 8, but your decision-making and rationalization will tilt towards one or the other.

So personality types like ENFJ mean “Extraversion-leaning, Intuition-leaning, Feeling-leaning, and Judging-leaning. They don’t say anything about what other traits you have, just that on this measurement scale, you lean towards those methods.

In most cases, your personality type has little bearing on who you are as a person. Instead, it records your capabilities as measured by a test in that moment, with your mood, stress levels, and recent activity taken into account. These tests are useful for businesses because they tell businesses what you might be able to achieve in the near future and what you’re likely to be like in the near future. They can also be useful for mental health professionals to provide a baseline of your outlook, responsiveness, and mood right now. However, many personality tests will change every time you take them if you take them every day for a week. That means they aren’t reliable as a measure of who you are tomorrow or who you are next week.

What else? Personality tests don’t actually measure your personality. They measure how you’re feeling and how they answer the questions. They also don’t measure compatibility with others, ability or willingness to learn, or your ability to fit into a group. Instead, general interests, ability to be agreeable, ability to compromise, and ability to open up to others. Those factors, more than anything else, will determine how you’re able to connect to others.

In fact, modern science isn’t sure if it’s valid to measure personality types at all. With no clear boundaries and significant overlaps in personality types, it’s usually better to measure personality traits and then understand that, for most people, those traits go up and down based on mood, stress, and current situation. Personality is flexible, because life requires it.

Does that mean you can’t use your personality test to make judgements about yourself? Absolutely not. Your personality test is likely a reasonable snapshot of your behavior and your answers right now – providing you’re honest when you fill it in. You can also broaden the perspective of those tests by taking more assessments, looking at measures of personality traits rather than judgements of overall personality, and also figuring out how that changes or goes up and down based on things like mood. Eventually, it means you’ll have more insight into how your personality affects your life and what you are capable of – which will help you in other ways.

Serotonin plays a far-reaching role in the body. In most cases, it can be considered a communicator. It transmits messages across the central nervous system and across the enteric nervous system – which goes on to impact the adrenal system, pituitary system, metabolism, and multiple other functions. This allows the reward circuit in the brain to function by transmitting signals to and from the brain and body as necessary. It allows the brain to properly process information. It regulates emotions and mood. It also helps to regulate feelings of anxiety and worry – both through the central nervous system and through the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) which is behind the human stress response and cortisol production.

Eventually that breaks down into:

typically experience symptoms like:

All of that can be self-reinforcing, which means you feel worse because of low serotonin, and then produce less serotonin because of the side-effects. As a result, depression, anxiety, and even gut health problems often spiral and become worse over time if you don’t get treatment, even if the original issue is a physical one rather than a mental one.

Of course, Serotonin also plays many other roles in the body. Therefore, it can impact your body in other ways. Often, that means you’ll see side-effects from mental health and from gut health problems that can look like a range of mental and physical health problems. However, mood regulation, gut health, and fatigue issues are generally the most common problems and very often tie in together – so that if you start with one, you eventually end up with all three.

Getting help for mental health problems, especially when they are tied into physical health problems, can be complicated. For example, it’s often difficult or impossible to tell which came first, gut health problems or mental health problems. For that reason, the starting point is often medication and taking steps to ensure you’re producing serotonin at a healthy level.

You might be aware that one of the most common medications for people with depression is an SSRI or a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. This class of drugs reduces how quickly your brain breaks down or reabsorbs serotonin, meaning you have more serotonin available in the brain and in the body, even if serotonin production is low. These drugs are safe, non-addictive, and allow you to increase serotonin levels in the body, which can be used as either a short-term measure to aid in treatment or a long-term measure if your body is not producing enough serotonin.

In each case, treatment is generally also backed up with additional treatment including nutritional therapy, behavioral therapy, and counseling. That means creating a tailored and personalized approach to treatment, adapting it as you respond or not. That can also include medication for gut health, it can include exercise and nutrition, it can include behavioral treatment to help you improve how you regulate emotions even when you feel bad. All of that comes together to give you a toolkit to better manage your mental and physical health, both of which will work to improve each other.

Otherwise, getting help for serotonin issues, even if they are mental health problems or rooted entirely in physical health problems, means getting a tailored approach that specifically targets your actual health problems and works to respond to those as you move forward in treatment.

Mental illnesses, including behavioral disorders, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and most other mental health problems directly change the brain. Often, this is a two-part change of changes in hormones and neurotransmitters and changes in behavior building different habits or pathways in the brain.

This might look like:

That all sounds counterproductive of your brain doesn’t it? The truth is, the brain adapts to the environment it’s given. That means that the more you indulge feeling bad and the more you give yourself leeway to not engage with behaviors that improve mental health, the harder it will be to pick that back up. At the same time, neuroplasticity works in reverse:

If you or a loved one is struggling with mental health, it’s important to recognize that there is help. Reaching out to talk to your doctor, working your way towards behavioral therapy, and getting mental health interventions can set you on the path to permanent change and permanent improvement in your quality of life. Eventually, that will mean you have the patterns and the skills to better navigate mental health so you can be happier.

Often, it’s the case that some foods are extremely good for you because they are healthy, affordable, and accessible. For example, apples are one of the best fruits you can eat. However, food is better when you eat a diverse range of fruits, vegetables, and protein sources. The more you mix your diet up, the higher the chances that you’re having a healthy and well-balanced diet.

important for your mental health as what you do eat. For example:

Following those rules, you automatically have to watch your intake of:

For example, if you look at the back of a pack of frozen lasagna, it’s about 12 grams of fat per 290 calories, meaning you’d max out your recommended fat intake before meeting your daily caloric requirements for the day if you ate nothing but that.

If you want more advice, including meal advice and shopping lists, government resources like MyPlate.gov offer it for free.

If you’re struggling with depression, improving your nutrition is one good step you can take. Many of us struggle to cook and eat well at the best of times, let alone when depressed. That normally means you’ll have to take steps to ensure you have the resources to do so. For example:

• Ask for help with cooking and preparing meals
• Do meal prep if you can manage
• Move into a social living or support housing situation with communal meals
• Go to inpatient therapy and get help with depression while building the skills and routines you need to eat in a healthy fashion
• Talk to your doctor and ask for advice

Eventually, everyone is different. You might have an easy time switching to a healthy diet. You might already have a healthy diet. On the other hand, you might not know how to cook, you might be too busy to easily add food prep into your routine, and you might have no real idea of what counts as healthy. Getting help means you’ll have someone help you with building habits and routine, with food prep, and with anything else you need to make your lifestyle support recovery and feeling good. That may mean you need a nutritionist or dietician, it may need you need social support, it may mean you need therapy, and it may mean you need something small like a meal box or other solution. You’re the only person who can gauge what that is. Good luck.

Passive suicidal ideation can take a lot of different forms. For many people, it means expressing or showing thoughts of wanting to die. Others will never voice those thoughts aloud. That can mean you’ll never notice or see suicidal ideation until it’s too late. However, you can look for signs like:

You can also look for statements like:

You can also look for signs of poor mental health like:

These latter symptoms can map to a very large number of mental health problems. However, they all point to the fact that this person is not doing well and probably needs help.

In any case where you’re experiencing suicidal ideation, you should be seeking help. If you have recurring thoughts of death, wanting to die, not wanting to live, self-harm, or suicide, you should be talking to a mental health professional. Often, that starts with talking to your doctor who can recommend you to a therapist or to other treatment. However, you can also reach out and ask for treatment directly from a mental health clinic or center.

Suicidal ideation is always a warning that something is wrong, and it is always a good sign to reach out and ask for help. If you or a loved one is experiencing even passive suicidal ideation, the time to seek out help is now.

Each of these can mean doing some significant work on yourself before talking to your loved one. You have to be able to talk about suicide and self-harm with nothing but concern for your loved one. Focusing on putting that concern first, “I care about you, and I want you to be okay” as your main message can help with that.

It’s important to be aware of what mental health resources you have available to you. That means starting by talking to your doctor. You can also call the National Suicide Hotline at 988. This hotline gives advice and resources as well as directions to professionals for people struggling with suicidal ideation and their loved ones. This means you can ask for support and next steps and get guidance on what to say or do in a situation.

Suicidal ideation is often a symptom of an underlying mental health problem. For many people, that means seeking out professional mental health treatment. For example, behavioral therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy and EMDR are very commonly used to help people understand, cope with and move past their suicidal thoughts. That can involve months or even years of treatment and some people will never recover from suicidal ideation. However, therapy and treatment will give them tools to better manage those thoughts, so they are safer no matter what their thoughts tell them.

You can work towards getting your loved one into treatment. That means being there for them, suggesting treatment as an option, talking to them when they need it, and being someone they can trust to help. Your loved one won’t go to treatment or therapy until they are ready, however, you can work to let them know that they are worth the effort, that treatment is there, and that you want them to be better, for you and also for them. “I care about you and you deserve this help” can go a long way.

Cannabis is widely regarded as increasing vulnerability to schizophrenia. Often, that means the individual had an underlying but dormant schizophrenic disorder. It’s not yet known if cannabis can cause schizophrenia in a person without genetic inclination for the disorder, but it is thought that the answer is no. This means that genetics play a very large role in cannabis contributing to schizophrenia.

If you have a family history of schizophrenia, it’s normally better to avoid psychosis-inducing drugs altogether. While they won’t “cause” schizophrenia, they can trigger it, bringing formerly dormant symptoms to the surface. Multiple studies indicate that cannabis can play a role in activating schizophrenia, meaning that you will be more likely to develop symptoms and to need a diagnosis. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to assess your medical history for the risk of schizophrenia before smoking. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that schizophrenia increases your risk of drug use and using cannabis to cope with symptoms. If you’re using, it’s a good idea to stop and evaluate why and to seek support and treatment for those symptoms.

In almost every case, there is a complex interplay between risks, factors, and triggers. You won’t develop schizophrenia because you smoked once. However, cannabis can and does contribute to an increase in psychosis, even if it seems mild. If you start experiencing paranoia, it’s a good first warning sign and a good reason to stop smoking and look for treatment.

Of course, most drugs are relatively safe in moderation. Still, many of us are “high risk”, meaning we take on extra risks of complications, triggering underlying problems, and even addiction when we use them. If that is you, it’s better to avoid smoking or using altogether.

Take the first step towards reclaiming control of your life by seeking help for cannabis addiction today. Contact our addiction treatment team today, we are here to support you on your journey to recovery.

Your first step should always be to talk to your doctor. That’s true whether or not you have a diagnosis. Here, you should:

Nearly everyone with a psychosis diagnosis will require medication either permanently or intermittently throughout their lives. Most schizophrenia patients require medication for their entire lives. Data shows that about 30% of schizophrenia patients can manage without medication – after 10 years of treatment and learning to cope with symptoms.

This means that talking to your doctor and working out your prescription, if your prescription is still right for you, and how to combine it with therapy is an important first step. You likely need antipsychotics to benefit from mental health treatment. That will mean getting a prescription if you don’t already have one, waiting for it to take effect, and then moving into treatment that can work with you based on those symptoms.

Long-term care means investing your health for the long-term that means investing in self-care and ongoing support. This means:

• Taking care of yourself with good sleep, eating, and exercise habits
• Having a good routine
• Learning communication and problem-solving skills
• Having social support
• Having meaningful things to do with your time
• Getting ongoing treatment

Many people do prefer to get help with this, especially in the first few years after diagnosis. However, that should often be in the form of professional support and not simply relying on family to help you. This means assisted living, visiting social workers, social care, and even at-home nursing and care. What works for you will vary depending on your situation, but it is an important thing to consider.

Getting Help

If you’re moving back into your life after a psychosis breakdown and incarceration, it’s important to reach out and get help. That almost always starts with your doctor, where you can talk about what your options are, review your diagnosis and prescription, and get a referral into mental health treatment. From there, you can get mental health treatment to ensure you have the tools to manage your disorder long-term, so you can recover, and so you can learn to recognize and act when your mental health starts to go downhill. Good luck rebounding!

Redeemed Mental Health is a mental health & dual diagnosis treatment center offering PHP, IOP, and individual levels of care. Contact us today to begin your journey of recovery!

Diet affects mental health in multiple ways. The first is that a good diet is the foundation for feeling good. Fueling your body with the micro and macro nutrients it needs gives you the foundation to feel good. That means eating well about 80% of the time, following government nutrition guidelines, and eating diverse foods. Eating well gives you energy, helps to stabilize your mood, and prevents you from crashing.

A poor diet also directly impacts your mental health in much more direct and negative ways. And a poor diet can mean many things.

Essentially, if you don’t eat well, you’re sabotaging your health in more ways than once. Unfortunately, the more problems you’re having with your mental health, the harder it will be to eat well. And, that creates a negative cycle.

If you’re struggling with mental health problems, it’s always important to ensure you’re getting enough nutrition. That means paying attention to how you’re eating and eating well. Unfortunately, without a blood test, you cannot decide if you have nutritional deficiencies. However, if you do, your doctor will likely prescribe remediating diets or supplements that can help you to recover more quickly. Otherwise, your best bet it to eat a healthy diet following the guidelines of something like myplate.gov.

If you’re struggling with mental health, making those decisions and consistently making good choices around food can be extremely difficult. For that reason, it may be a good idea to ask for help, to look into living in supported or shared living facility, or to ensure you have friends and family to help. Many people also benefit from meal prep and similar tactics. It’s also important to note that eating well is always more important than taking supplements, because supplements are rarely absorbed properly and may not help at all – while they cost a great deal.

Getting Help

If you’re struggling with mental health you can always reach out and ask for help. Often, that starts with your doctor, where you can get blood tests to check nutrition and recommendations into therapy and treatment.

Here, treating mental health disorders with comorbid nutritional deficiencies is often a multi-disciplinary approach. For example, you’ll typically receive:

• CBT or another traditional mental health treatment to help you manage and cope with the mental health problems
• Nutritional therapy to help you recover from the nutritional deficiency as quickly as possible
• Life skills therapy and training to ensure you have the skills and the habits in place to take care of yourself and to eat healthy meals

Good treatment should take a whole-body approach of looking at your body and your mind, taking time to allow both to heal. And, that can take a long time. That’s especially true if you have intestinal inflammation that reduces your ability to absorb nutrients. Recovering from nutritional problems can take months or even years. Mental health problems may also never go away and you may instead learn skills to cope with them and mitigate them.

However, getting treatment will ensure you have the tools to live your life in as happy of a way as possible.

Redeemed Mental Health is a mental health & dual diagnosis treatment center offering PHP, IOP, and individual levels of care. Contact us today to begin your journey of recovery!