MentalSpace Therapy

Something worth knowing on a Thursday morning. The U.S. Surgeon General put out an advisory in 2023 on loneliness and social connection. The findings were blunt: being socially disconnected is linked to a 29 percent higher risk of heart disease and 32 percent higher risk of stroke, with effects on Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHealing #...

If you or someone you love spent time in an ICU, please read this. Surviving critical illness can leave marks that have nothing to do with the original diagnosis. There's a name for it: Post-Intensive Care Syndrome. It shows up as new or worsening problems in three areas at once, thinking, mood, an Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHea...

Question for anyone who works in healthcare, emergency services, education, or child welfare: Have you ever done exactly what you were supposed to do, followed every rule, and still felt like you'd done something unforgivable? That has a name. It's called moral injury, and it's not the same as PTS Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #Cop...

Can we talk about burnout for a second? Not the joking kind, the real kind. The WHO describes occupational burnout in three parts: bone-deep exhaustion, growing cynicism toward your job, and the feeling that you're no longer good at something you used to be good at. If two of those three sound like Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHea...

There's no funeral. No casserole. No card. And the loss arrives again every month. Infertility gets treated as a medical problem with a medical timeline. What rarely gets addressed is what it does to a person's inner life — the two-week waits, the appointments scheduled around work you can't explai Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #Co...

"The pain is real. But your labs came back fine." If you've heard some version of that, you already know how isolating chronic pain gets. What often goes unsaid in those appointments: pain and mood run on overlapping circuitry. Living with persistent pain raises the risk of depression, and depressi Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #Co...

Some wounds aren't about what happened. They're about who it happened with. Betrayal trauma is what can develop when the person who hurt you is someone you depended on — a partner, a parent, a close friend, sometimes an institution you trusted. The source of the injury and the source of safety were Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingA...

Not sadness. Just… nothing. Anhedonia is the loss of pleasure or interest in things that used to matter — music that no longer moves you, food that tastes like cardboard, friends you can't summon the energy to text back. People usually describe it as flatness rather than pain. That's part of why i Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAn...

Chewing. Pen clicking. Heavy breathing. For some people, these aren't just annoying — they set off genuine distress. Misophonia is a strong emotional and physical reaction to specific repeated sounds. It isn't being dramatic or oversensitive. Current research points to differences in how the brain Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAn...

You can love someone deeply and still be running on empty. Caregiver burnout builds slowly — the appointments, the medication schedules, the nights you sleep with one ear open. It rarely announces itself. It shows up as exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, irritability that surprises you, and a creep Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHea...

Some weeks, the exhaustion isn't about your job or your sleep. Race-based traumatic stress is what happens when discrimination, microaggressions, and the weight of what you see accumulate in the body. Researchers describe symptoms that overlap with PTSD: hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, emotiona Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHea...

Myth: "I'm too old to suddenly develop depression." Reality: the years leading up to menopause are one of the highest-risk windows for mood changes in a woman's life — and most people are never told that. Perimenopause can start in your late thirties or forties and last for years. As estrogen fluc Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia...

If you've been told you have PTSD but the description never quite fit, there may be a reason. Complex PTSD develops from prolonged, repeated trauma — childhood neglect, long-term abuse, chronic instability — rather than a single event. Alongside the flashbacks and hypervigilance people associate wi Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHea...

If you've had a sudden, terrifying thought about something bad happening to your baby — and it left you shaken, ashamed, and afraid to say it out loud — please hear this: having the thought does not mean you want it to happen. Intrusive, unwanted, scary thoughts during pregnancy and after birth are Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHea...

If you've ever pictured catatonia as someone frozen in place forever, you're not alone — but that image misses the truth. Catatonia isn't a permanent state, and it isn't "just shutting down." It's a real, recognized syndrome where movement and responsiveness get disrupted. Sometimes that looks like Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehe...

If some days your mind won't stop racing — and other days feel too heavy to get out of bed — you're not imagining it, and you're not alone. Anxiety and depression are two of the most common mental health conditions, and they very often show up together. That's part of why treating only one can leave Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georg...

If school always felt harder for you than it seemed to be for everyone else — and you quietly decided you just weren't smart — please read this. Specific Learning Disorder is real, it's brain-based, and it doesn't vanish in adulthood. Reading, writing, or math that stays a struggle no matter the ef Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #Co...

Ever seen a family member walk around or sit up screaming in the night, then have zero memory of it in the morning? That's not them "acting out a dream" — sleepwalking and sleep terrors happen in deep sleep, which is why the memory just isn't there. They're common in children but stick around for s Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for G...

Quick one worth passing along: "Hallucinogen Use Disorder" is a real thing, not just a phase. When use of substances like LSD or psilocybin keeps going despite problems at work, at home, or with your own body — cravings, needing more, or perceptual changes that stick around — that's a pattern a prof Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #C...

Quick myth-buster, and an important one: people living with Factitious Disorder are not simply "faking for attention." This is a real and serious mental health condition, one of the most misunderstood there is. Factitious Disorder means a person falsifies, exaggerates, or even brings on physical or Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingA...

Let's clear up one of the most misunderstood conditions in mental health: Schizoid Personality Disorder. It gets confused with shyness or introversion all the time, but it's something distinct. It's a long-standing pattern of detachment from relationships along with limited emotional expression, a r Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #C...

Quick myth-buster, and an important one: people living with Factitious Disorder are not simply "faking for attention." This is a real and serious mental health condition, one of the most misunderstood there is. Factitious Disorder means a person falsifies, exaggerates, or even brings on physical or Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingA...

Let's clear up one of the most misunderstood conditions in mental health: Schizoid Personality Disorder. It gets confused with shyness or introversion all the time, but it's something distinct. It's a long-standing pattern of detachment from relationships along with limited emotional expression, a r Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #C...

Tonight, a gentle word about something that often starts in a doctor's office: Sedative, Hypnotic, or Anxiolytic Use Disorder. Medications like Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin, and prescription sleep aids genuinely help many people, and dependence can still develop, even taken exactly as prescribed. It can Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHea...

Here's a condition almost no one talks about honestly: Pyromania. The myth is that anyone who deliberately sets fires is just a criminal. The clinical reality is more specific and more human: pyromania is a rare impulse-control disorder involving repeated, deliberate fire setting driven by an irresi Generated from Coping & Healing Counseling: Accessible Telehealth for Georgia #CopingAndHe...