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What is Executive Function - How it Relates to ADHD
This is part one in a series of videos talking about managing ADHD symptoms with medication. Because ADHD can be thought of as a disorder of executive functioning so understanding this is an important lead in to making behavioral...
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What is Apathy? How To Break Past It.
Apathy is one of those mental states that can be very debilitating. You really don’t care about anything. Apathy can be defined as reduced motivation to engage in goal-directed activities across 3 domains: Initiative, Interest and...
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Understanding Dissociative Identity Disorder aka Multiple Personality Disorder
Dissociative identity disorder develops when person fails to form a total personality that integrates all aspects of yourself and your emotions. For more on dissociative states watch this video on depersonalization. What Is...
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What is Akathisa? An Uncomfortable Medication Side Effect
Akathisia is a side effect of some medications mostly antipsychotics, antidepressants and antiemetics with are medications prescribed for nausea and vomiting. Some of these medications are ondansetron, brand name Zofran and promethazine...
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Why You Spend Time On Things You Don't Care About
How do you know what matters? If someone said what are your about? What are your values? Would be be able to tell them? You probably wouldn’t if you hadn’t already thought about this. It’s not because you don’t have any values. There are...
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Why do you gain weight with antidepressants and mood stabilizers?
Why do you gain weight with antidepressants and mood stabilizers? In this video I discuss two way. One way is by blocking histamine 1 receptors. We usually think of histamine as something that is associated with allergies and your immune...
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Why Do Antidepressants Take So Long To Work?
Antidepressants can take anywhere from 2 -6 weeks to see a therapeutic effect. You may notice a little improvement sooner than that, but the usual is weeks. There's a couple reasons for this. The first is due to the way the drug works....
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Why Antidepressants Make You Feel Worse - At First
This problem of antidepressants making you feel worse can happen when we use it for anxiety or depression. With depression, you can feel even more depressed after you take it, but if you keep taking it, that effect wears off. The problem...
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What Is Metabolic Syndrome? How To Check For It.
Have you ever heard of metabolic syndrome? It’s something you should know about if you take antipsychotic medications. All of the antipsychotic medications increase the risk of developing metabolic syndrome. Some do it more than others....
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What is Conversion Disorder - Anxiety Out Of Control?
Conversion disorder is also called functional neurologic symptom disorder. This is where you have medically unexplained neurological symptoms. The symptoms are thought to have a psychological basis because not only are they not supported...
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What is Body Dysmorphic Disorder?
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a brain disorder that creates faulty and inaccurate perceptions about your appearance. For some people you can even have delusional beliefs that make you think the flaws you see are an accurate...
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What Is Depersonalization Derealization Disorder?
Depersonalization is defined as feeling unreal and detached from your body’s thoughts, sensation and actions. It’s like you’re observing yourself and your thoughts. Things don’t seem real. Derealization is defined as feeling unreal and...
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What Causes Depression? – It's Not Just A Chemical Imbalance
The traditional way we approached the cause and treatment of depression is to see it as a chemical imbalance. That is you have in sufficient amounts of the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine and low levels of these...
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The Insecurity of Dependent Personality Disorder
Dependent personality disorder falls under the cluster C personality disorders which are the personalities where people appear fearful or anxious. The other two in this cluster are avoidant and obsessive compulsive. I’ve talked about...
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The Connection Between Anxiety and Stomach Problems
There’s a bidirectional relationship between gastrointestinal disorders and anxiety. This relationship is thought to be controlled by a gut-brain connection. Research studies have concluded that there is signaling between the gut and the...
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Skin Picking and Hair Pulling Explained. What are Body Focused Repetitive Behaviors?
The two most common behaviors are hair pulling and skin picking. These two have official names in the diagnostic manual. Hair pulling is called trichotillomania and skin-picking is called excoriation disorder. Even though...
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Postpartum Depression - What it Really Looks Like
What Postpartum Depression Really Looks Like. This is part one of a series I’m doing on women’s mental health topics. This video is based on a viewer question from Dr. Mohammed El Sherif who is a obstetrician gynecologist with his own...
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OCD Intrusive Thoughts: 4 Examples and A Look Into Compulsions
Obsessive compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder whereby you have either obsessions or compulsions or both. Most people have both but you can have one or the other. Some people use the term Pure O OCD to refer to only having...
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Narcissism vs Narcissistic - Here's The Important Difference
Narcissism is not a diagnosis. It’s a psychological concept that helps explain or define human behavior. It’s defined as love of the self. The name comes from the Greek mythological character, Narcissus. Narcissus was a handsome hunter...
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Lithium vs. Antipsychotics: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Lithium
Explore the journey of lithium, a game-changer in the late 1940s, as it transformed the treatment landscape for bipolar disorder. Join Dr. Tracey Marks, a dedicated psychiatrist, in this deep dive into the historical prominence of...
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Paranoid Personality Explained – When EVERYTHING is Suspect
The general definition of paranoid is being excessively suspicious or mistrustful. So you can have a moment of paranoia where are you preoccupied with suspicions about someone or something. But the difference here is that your suspicions...
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Rapid Cycling Bipolar and Ultra rapid Cycling and Ultradian. Why Does it Happen?
Rapid cycling is called a course specifier. It’s not a separate diagnosis, instead It used to describe the course of the illness. The rapid cycling specifier is added if you have 4 or more episodes of either depression, mania or...
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Psychedelics - Here’s Where We Are
Here’s rundown of the different psychedelics and why people are so excited about them. Psychedelics activate the serotonin 5HT2a receptor in the brain. Antidepressants and the atypical antipsychotics also affect this receptor but in...
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Magnesium for Anxiety and Depression? The Science Says Yes!
Magnesium is considered one of the essential minerals that is involved in more than 300 different body processes, including keeping your heart beating and maintaining electrical stability of your nervous system. Magnesium is used by the...