Honestly Unorthodox

Reframing negative events into those more optimistic had made marionettes of our hearts. I didn’t eat that unhealthy, sugar-laden apple fritter! I ate a non-nutrient-dense-food that I enjoyed and was still able to maneuver into my healthy lifestyle! I didn’t slack off on my responsibilities, routines, and committing to that which is difficult; I’m just in a different season right now. I didn’t sna...

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) is every socially-anxious person’s individual purgatory. Used to assess the physiological and psychological stress responses in humans, participants are tasked with delivering a speech to a group of evaluators about their strengths relating to a job opportunity. Immediately following delivery of their speech, they’re made to perform impromptu math problems in fr...

Please tune in until the end, where I have a couple somewhat-disturbing-but-eye-opening thought experiments to do with your kids over family dinner. Ha! The movie Fight Club forces its audience to confess the sins of their egos: hyper-consumerism, corporate fervor, and insistence on things being easy. One scene stuck out in particular as I watched the classic for the first time recently: Brad Pitt...

What if helping wasn’t heroic, but was expected? What if we stopped the glitz and glamor of “doing hard things” and just did them , alongside others, without making a spectacle of it? Is this not what it meant to contribute to society prior to monetizing our altruism online? Perhaps we test this theory using a “mental map” called inversion thinking, in which we examine the problem based on the opp...

I’ll admit, I’ve generated wicked fantasies of Elon and The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) storming into behavioral health clinics and exploiting the absolute lunacy being passed as billable service. My love for missions like DOGE started many moons ago when I first worked as a mental health technician in an acute psychiatric ward. Circa 2016, my purpose was that of integrating exercis...

I’d like to preface this piece with the understanding that I am not a “gym-bro” who worships macros as religious entities, nor am I a “health influencer” documenting my “journey” through overly-tight-and-too-small clothing. I’m simply a recovering lunatic who found solace in exercise, exercise that I was once banned from engaging in at every gym across the state of Illinois. Anorexia can sometimes...

Early in his career, Dr. Humphreys admitted, “How dare these people do things that I have all these degrees to do?” Many of us associate Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) with collective Bible-thumping. To be in AA is to become a sobriety Evangelist who walks with the Lord toward abstinence, reminding everyone of their journey as frequently as possible. This soft evangelism can overpower the benefits of g...

An untrained monkey can do my job. As in the quirky little jungle animals who have managed to escape all forms of psychological research testing and live their lives swinging and eating bugs off of each other’s ears. Others in my field disagree, and that’s fine. If you’ve been a reader for the past 3 years of this publication, you know I support the right to hold any opinion, no matter how inaccur...

My profession makes oodles of money off of overreacting to problems. The behavior plans we’re compelled to write because of insurance companies? Largely useless and unworkable in real-life. If you’re not a clinician, allow me to give you a brief overview of what a behavior plan is. A behavior plan attempts to find the “why” behind undesirable behavior. It then provides interventions based on this...

I told a group of women recently that we’re not cool, interesting, or important enough to be wasting time medicalizing our everyday choices. With a slight joking intonation, I took to saying “Who cares?” to most every remark about their step count, their sleep score through their Whoop and Aura rings, and their strategic, color-coded schedule for meditation, breath work, and cold-plunging. Where i...

This is part one of a five-part series in which I lay out five steps that I believe to be powerful shifts toward reclaiming common sense, at least as it relates to education and our mental wellbeing. We’re not in a mental health crisis. We’re also not infected by an absence-of-access-to-mental-health-care plague. Our children are not inherently damaged by virtue of being alive in a world dominated...

There are cases largely resistant to help, most because the help we provide does not adequately address the problem. Sure, we’ve racked up countless, inspirational stories of the clients who have turned their lives around and are basking in a glow of our supposed support. But what about the hundreds of thousands who would actually benefit from us involving ourselves less? Or, as Jack Black says, “...

An interesting question maybe all of us should consider: should we aim to increase positive thinking, or decrease negative thinking? I’ll go first, likely to the dismay of more sunshine-oriented crowds: we can add positive spins and language swaps and reframes to a cup of piss all we want. If the cup of water has piss in it, we’re still drinking piss. So we may as well reduce the volume of urine s...

“Hell yeah! I love that you’re so impulsive.” – our realtor, when we bought our first house. A small portion of me was offended. Mostly because I’d tried my hardest to conceal my impulsivity and trick people into believing I’m a thoughtful, mature woman with the ability to weigh and measure her options carefully. This kind, perfect stranger, who meant no passive-aggressive harm in this statement,...

“Those who make themselves look bigger on borrowed power are essentially living according to other people’s value systems.” Impersonating someone else, with the intention of manipulating public perception, is a childhood no-no. ‘ Be your truest self’ , people say . ‘You are worth it!’; ‘Why be someone else when you are so special just as you are!’ I’m pretty sure I’ve seen such adages stamped on c...

It’s easier to believe that our problems are unique and highly complex than what they truly are: normal and run-of-the-mill. Doing so allows us to sidestep the entirely unglamorous, mundane, but effective, foundational steps. The basics, if you will. In deciding that we are above the basics, and that only a hyper-individualized plan tailor-made to our one-of-a-kind challenges will “work”, we distr...

We love to outsource things that we’re perfectly capable of doing ourselves. We’re spellbound by numbered infographics and “hacks” that promise ease of use and immediacy. This occurs in large part because we’re innately lazy, in tandem with our advanced society prioritizing ease and comfort over much else. If I told you resource-gathering and certification-collecting is just another form of procra...

The great condemnation of the “Almond Mom” is yet another online trend which points to Mom and Dad as the main culprits for a myriad of psychiatric problems. “Almond Moms” are health-crazed parents described as “fatphobic” people who use their body weight and image as a yardstick to judge their own, and their kids’, self-worth. Their behavior, according to some, is largely disordered and emanating...

One of the craziest things I’ve heard in clinical fields in recent years is that controversy around “stimming”. Let them stim! Let them rock and flap and tap and shake, it’s their character and their divergence! All of these things may be true. But what’s also true about completely dismissing basic social etiquette is that we’re willingly isolating people from social situations because of their be...

Below is a common exchange between patient and provider: “I’m feeling really anxious and brain fog and overwhelmed.” See a psychiatrist for an SSRI. “I’m constantly exhausted and can’t lose weight.” See an endocrinologist for metformin. Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. “We’re trying to have a baby, but I have PCOS.” See a gynecol...

Modern schools are spellbound by “social emotional learning”, or the pursuit of integrating coping skills, attitudes, and “coping behaviors” into educational lessons to better teach emotional regulation skills. It certainly sounds noble. Children have largely been deemed emotional terrorists, which renders their parents exhausted and resentful and in desperate  need of a program like SEL which pro...

While modern culture may suggest otherwise, anorexia develops out of issues far more complicated than being taught sugar is “bad” and butter is “fattening”. The basics of nutritional science can be a sting to many of us that grew up with ultra-processed foods being treated as primary meals: Twinkies and fun-size Oreos were snacks, and hot dogs with Wonder bread were dinner. We didn’t concern ourse...

THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE.THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE.THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE.THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT...

Limiting others or ourselves to simplified categories is convenient, but unhelpful. As a species who generally hates to be bothered with thinking critically, it’s understandable why we’d eliminate the guesswork and immediately jump to calling ourselves “anxious”, or our mother-in-law as “anxiously attached”, or our spouse as having “social anxiety”. All of these may be true: we may experience bout...

Topics covered: * How we can better understand what people mean when they say something “works” for them * Lifestyle habits can cause psychiatric symptoms, but we’re given pills before trying to change our lifestyle??!?! * Your antidepressants won’t do anything if you’re drinking an extra large Cinnamon Churro Dunkin’ Donuts Iced Coffee Macchiato for breakfast * “Not having enough time” and “just...