In middle school, I struggled to learn as quickly as most of my classmates. Sometimes, I could not finish all my in-class assignments during the school day. So I added them to my homework folder. As my homework folder thickened, my anxiety increased. Looking back, several strategies helped me get through my homework anxiety. Continue reading this post to learn about five of those methods.

Teenage suicide was an issue before the COVID-19 pandemic started. Due to the drastic effects of the pandemic on mental health, suicide is an even bigger concern for teenagers now. By knowing the exact reasons and signs of teenage suicide cases, you can save lives. Continue reading to learn about how to prevent teenage suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Note: This post contains a trigger warning.)

Journal prompts make it easier to journal consistently, but I haven't been using them. It came to my attention while I was sitting in the waiting room before my therapist appointment. A million thoughts raced through my head. "So many things have happened since my last visit. Where did we leave off last time? What do I say?" Across from me, another patient held a journal. When I saw it, I realized what I'd been missing. I didn't have a record about events that triggered my depression and anxiety. Having a written record of moods, events, and triggers would have been really helpful at that time. I know journaling strengthens my mental health and journal prompts can help facilitate this. Here is an easy journal prompt that you can use for your mental health.

This quote has made me consider if mental illness really is the barrier to success we imagine it to be: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. Throughout my life I have found myself in positions that I thought would break me entirely. I have sat in my room with no door, surrounded by debts, destruction and bowls of my own vomit. I have laid in a hospital bed, covered in tubes and wires – desperate and alone. And I have crouched on the floor of mental institutions, rocking and trapped, painting bloody smears on the walls from the masochism of my own fingernails. But has all this mental illness been a barrier to success?

In my experience, I have found that the diagnosis of a mental disorder can be almost as difficult to deal with as the illness itself. In fact, it can be enough to throw your whole life off kilter and send you spiraling down into the blackest abyss – scrabbling at mass segments of misplaced sanity and reason. Or at least, that’s how it was for me. Being diagnosed with anorexia as a teen -- 13 -- evoked a conflicting quantity of emotions. I was hit with a sense of surrealism, fear, confusion and even a barely formed hint of masochistic pride. Because the verdict literally happened overnight, one moment I was a young, active and apparently healthy teenage girl – and the next I was anything but. I was anorexic -- malnourished, insensible and broken. I was a pariah.