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ALCOHOLISM-
"Happy Hour" All Day? Drinking While Working at Home.
Working from home encourages problem drinking.
Setting limits can help.
Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

KEY POINTS-
Working from home makes some people want to drink more, and they may do so when working at home.
In-person work has its challenges for problem drinkers, but it can also provide needed structure and social support.
One can make a plan to get problem drinking under control, starting with an assessment.

One in eight of all full-time workers in the United States now perform their jobs entirely remotely. This is five times the pre-pandemic rate. For professionals whose jobs don't need them to be on-site every day, the numbers are even higher. Most white-collar jobs offer at least a hybrid option of working at home one or two days per week.

Much of this is good news for people who have the ability to work at home for at least part of the week. According to Stanford scholar Nicholas Bloom, working from home can enhance overall job satisfaction—as reflected by a 35 percent reduction in job quitting rates. People working from home are engaging in more outdoor recreation, including playing more golf, which increased by more than 50 percent since 2019, especially on weekdays. But, it's not all good news for people who have an issue with problem drinking.

Working From Home Can Lead to Greater Alcohol Consumption
Remote work, for some people, is accompanied by a substantial increase in alcohol consumption. During the COVID pandemic, more than a third of Americans reported consuming more alcohol while working at home than was previously the case. While the lockdowns and imposed isolations are over (we hope), those who continue to work from home at least two days per week report higher levels of alcohol consumption than people who do not work from home at all. Studies also indicate that:

The sharpest spikes in alcohol intake are seen in younger adults working from home.
Executives and others in managerial positions report higher levels of alcohol consumption than front-line staff members.
Professionals with higher levels of education report higher levels of alcohol consumption than less educated people—possibly because their jobs are more conducive to being done remotely.
A number of factors contribute to a rise in problem drinking among people working at home. These factors include blurred boundaries, reduced fear of detection, convenience, and availability.

Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Leisure Contribute to Heavier Drinking
Unless you are extremely disciplined, the boundaries between work and leisure tend to become blurred when you work at home. When does work end and private time start when your colleagues, managers, or clients expect you to be available 24/7?

Blurring the boundaries between work and home may be eroding inhibitions about drinking "on the job" when your workplace is also your private residence.

"Closet" Drinking Is Easier at Home
At an office, you might never even think about putting wine or beer in your coffee cup to help you get through a long meeting. Others in the meeting are likely to smell the alcohol. Online, this is not an issue. Being able to drink undetected removes one of the "backstops" that often discourage drinking in the workplace. Without a backstop, some remote workers drink more frequently and in larger quantities in the course of a workday.

Unlimited Availability
Anyone who has worked at home knows how much the refrigerator can be a temptation. The same is true for alcoholic beverages. At home, there is unobstructed access to alcohol any time of the day or night.

Drinking to Dull Pain When You Have Less Social Contact
The isolation of working from home can encourage reaching for alcohol as a way to manage unpleasant stressors. Alcohol can offer a balm to the pain or loneliness that feels more intense when we work less often alongside other people.

Drinking While Working at Home Can Escalate into a Serious Problem
Drinking from home does take longer to detect but over time it certainly can catch up with you. Over time, your drinking may increase incrementally before you realize that it has become a deeply ingrained habit, if not a full-blown addiction.

Alcohol can reduce your productivity, limit your ability to manage your professional responsibilities, impair your judgment, damage your health, and compound other mental health challenges you have. Drinking can completely derail your career and cause your relationships to deteriorate.

Make a Plan to Deal With Your Drinking
If you’re concerned, it’s important to get help as soon as you start noticing that your drinking is becoming a problem. With proper support, you can get your alcohol consumption under better control. Here are some initial steps you can take:

Start with an online self-assessment.
Set your goals. With your psychologist, you can determine if you can aim to learn how to drink in moderation or if you should focus on abstinence.
Structure your week to reduce the opportunities for drinking. This may include spending more time in the office, working in a shared space, or setting strict times for work and leisure.
Get social support that you might be missing from in-office work. This might include joining a support group, spending more in-person time with friends or family, or joining a team.
Try to identify the stressors and emotional issues that might be powering your drink. Seek professional therapy from an addiction psychologist or other qualified practitioner who can help you learn new coping skills and reduce your need to "self-medicate" with alcohol or other substances.

3 Dangers of Constantly Faking a Positive Attitude.
There is a dark side to manufactured happiness. Here’s what it is.
Reviewed by Davia Sills

KEY POINTS-
People who are going through difficult times are often encouraged by social norms to act positively.
While genuine positivity can help those who are struggling, faking it can have harmful effects on someone's health and well-being.
Fake positivity can also erode meaningful relationships that might otherwise be a support.

We all experience challenges and struggles at various points in our lives that leave us feeling exhausted, stressed, and anxious. During such times, social norms encourage us to mask our true emotions behind the veil of positivity. We may receive tidbits of advice like:

“You may not feel it now, but you have to fake it until you make it.”
“This is all in your mind. Just smile, and you will feel better.”
“Only focus on feeling better, and you’ll see your problems disappear.”
While positivity can be a helpful tool for overcoming certain challenges and setbacks, constantly feigning happiness can take a serious toll on our mental health and can prevent us from addressing the root causes of our problems.

Here are three research-backed reasons why it’s sometimes not OK to just keep smiling.

1. It bottles up real emotions.
It is impossible to expect yourself to be 100 percent genuine and authentic about what you are feeling on the inside. Time, place, and situation often dictate the appropriateness of our expressions—guiding us, in certain cases, to protect someone else’s feelings or respect others’ space.

Holding back and masking your true emotions with a smile for the greater good is a good skill to have at your disposal. However, always smiling to avoid dealing with your own discomfort can be a sign of a deeper, toxic pattern.

One study published in the Academy of Management Journal discovered that workers who tried to fake their emotions and go on with their day reported worsened emotional states over time.

Smiling to keep up a facade is self-deceiving and only delays the inevitable. While sometimes we need to smile our way through a tough spot, constantly divorcing yourself from your true feelings does more psychological harm than good.

2. It leads to unrealistic beliefs.
Conventional wisdom suggests the more people smile, the more positive they feel, and those positive feelings enhance well-being.

Challenging this popular belief, an article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that frequent smiling may, in fact, backfire. It is not the act of smiling itself that increases happiness or well-being, but the interpretation of the smile as a reflection of happiness that holds more weight.

To put simply, the belief “I am happy because I smile” can be counterproductive as opposed to “I smile because I am happy.”

Other unhelpful beliefs that can lead to unrealistic expectations and jeopardize well-being are:

“I am invincible; nothing hurts me” versus “I am strong enough to overcome this obstacle.”
“My life is just perfect” versus “I am happy where I currently am, and I will work toward making a better life for myself.”
“I am the most beautiful among my friends” versus “I love the way I look and enjoy making an effort on my appearance.”
Affirmations that don’t align with one’s internal values can lead to added resistance, creating complacency and reduced accountability for one’s own happiness.

3. It gives an untrue impression.
In the quest to convince yourself of your happiness, you also inevitably give the same impression to friends and loved ones, which prompts them to treat you in a particular manner.

While a positive self-representation can definitely encourage a more positive outlook, an honest self-representation returns on one’s need for social support. Studying the online behavior of individuals on Facebook, researchers found that genuine self-disclosure plays an important role in signaling one’s need for social support.

“While hiding behind a smiling Facebook mask, one may still feel happy,” states the lead author of the study, psychologist Junghyun Kim. “Such happiness, however, may not be rooted in meaningful social support provided by Facebook friends.”

Conclusion
Continuously feigning happiness and positivity can lead to a misrepresentation of your true emotional state. This can cause emotional confusion, and it can influence others to interact with you in unhelpful ways. Most importantly, it can get in the way of you getting the mental health help and support you need.

ALCOHOLISM-
Why I’m Hooked on Psych.
A Personal Perspective: The study and treatment of addictive disorders.
Reviewed by Lybi Ma

KEY POINTS-
Alcohol use disorder is a global and prevalent mental health concern.
Having a parent with an alcohol use disorder can be life-altering, but it does not need to be life-defining.
There is support for individuals who are close to those with problems related to drinking.
I have spent nearly half of my life studying psychology, with much of this time focused on substance use and addiction. It is not uncommon for others to ask why I have chosen to devote so much of myself to the study of and treatment of addictive disorders.

The Personal Hook
I initially entered this field for very personal reasons. My father had an alcohol use disorder. While the definition of AUD has changed over time, it is currently diagnosed according to DSM-5 criteria as having two or more symptoms related to one’s drinking that have a significant physical and or emotional impact on one’s life.1 Examples of these symptoms include difficulty controlling or stopping one’s drinking and continued drinking despite social, interpersonal, or occupational problems. These symptoms need to be in place over the past 12 months for it to be a current concern. While I will never know if my father was formally diagnosed with AUD, his drinking pattern and behaviour when intoxicated were consistent with this diagnosis.

While the personal impact can play out very differently in various households, I often felt alone among my peers as a child and then as a teenager navigating being a child of someone with AUD. Little did I know that AUDs are one of the most prevalent mental health conditions in the world, affecting nearly 9 percent of adult men and nearly 2 percent of adult women.2 I was actually among millions of children with a parent with AUD.

Unfortunately, my father did not reach a point where he regained control over his drinking. He died suddenly from heart disease a few weeks shy of his 67th birthday. It is a common misconception that alcohol is good for the heart. In fact, alcohol use, particularly when exceeding one to two standard drinks per day, has been shown to have toxic effects on heart health.3 To help cope with this loss, I briefly attended Al-Anon, a group focused on supporting people who are worried about someone else’s drinking.4 This group was incredibly helpful and supportive, and I only wished I had learned about this option earlier in my life.

Within a few months of processing my grief, I changed career paths and majors from pre-med to psychology, with the goal of becoming a clinical psychologist. Needless to say, these personal experiences played an incredibly important role in who I am and where I am today.

The Intellectual Hook
While these personal factors undoubtedly steered my life towards clinical psychology and researching and treating addiction, I have grown to appreciate that my passion for this field has outgrown my original reasons for study. Addiction to substances is incredibly widespread, and the use of certain substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are leading preventable causes of mortality and morbidity.2,5 Nonetheless, further work is needed to develop and strengthen interventions for many of these concerns. My continued work in this area is fueled by my desire to rectify this problem for individuals who are harmed by substances, including those who use the substances and those who are in their lives.

Where I am now
I conduct research examining factors increasing the risk for substance-related concerns and evaluate and develop interventions for substance use. I also supervise and mentor students who have an interest in this field, with the hope of nurturing future researchers and clinicians.

Why Mothers Are Our Number One Hero.
Mothers fulfill at least a dozen important psychological functions of heroism.
Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

KEY POINTS-
Research consistently shows that people list their mother as their favorite hero.
Mothers fulfill many important psychological functions involving mental and emotional well-being.
Mothers can mentor us through our nostalgic reminiscing even after they are gone.

Each year we celebrate Mother’s Day and for good reason. Our mothers are our number one heroes, according to our surveys. Fathers occupy second place in our hero surveys, but they are a distant second.

Mothers are indeed the mother of all heroes.

How do mothers do it? Over the past decade, psychologists have been able to identify at least 12 functions of heroes and heroism:
Heroes give us hope.
Heroes energize us.
Heroes develop us.
Heroes heal us.
Heroes impart wisdom.
Heroes are role models for morality.
Heroes offer safety and protection.
Heroes give us positive emotions.
Heroes give us meaning and purpose.
Heroes provide social connection and reduce loneliness.
Heroes help individuals achieve personal goals.
Heroes help society achieve societal goals.
Our mothers play a role in fulfilling these 12 functions, either directly or indirectly. This list of hero functions tells us that mothers offer benefits that span many dimensions of human well-being.

First, Mothers confer basic survival benefits (e.g., safety and healing). They protect us when we’re young and vulnerable and are there for us when we get sick or injured. Second, consistent with recent research, mothers give us cognitive benefits, such as intelligence, creativity, and wisdom.

Third, mothers offer motivational benefits. They are our biggest cheerleaders and inspire us to become our best selves. Fourth, mothers provide emotional benefits. Although there are obvious exceptions, mothers are often warmer and more nurturant than fathers.

Fifth, mothers bestow moral and spiritual benefits. Mothers teach us empathy and compassion for others. As children, we watch our mothers’ selflessness and daily sacrifices and learn that we’re all called to perform these acts of kindness for others. Finally, our mothers offer existential benefits such as meaning and purpose. They show us that connection and love for family and friends are the foundation for living a healthy life.

In short, mothers help us survive, and they help us thrive. They help us through our worst times and prepare us for our best times. Fathers do these things, too, but mothers somehow have an edge.

One of the most important research findings about heroes is that they don’t have to be physically present to help us survive and thrive. Research shows that just remembering our heroes can do the job for us. Nostalgia for our mothers, whether they’re alive or gone, can produce these 12 benefits of heroism. We all benefit from the memory of our heroes, often in ways we’re unaware of.

Mother’s Day far exceeds Father’s Day regarding greeting card sales and gift expenditures, and for good reason. Mothers are our Number One Hero because they shape us in the best of ways. They are there for us when we need emotional support. Mothers love us and hug us. They comfort us when we most need it and role model love in countless ways.

Social norms are changing, and we now see more fathers taking on the role of nurturers than in previous generations. But the emerging science of heroism helps explain why we reserve a special place in our hearts for our heroic mothers.

STRESS-
Inequities Poison Us All.
How inequities chronically inflame everyone’s bodies, even the most privileged.
Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

KEY POINTS-
Social inequities are a powerful predictor of health.
Inequities increase our risk of many health conditions through chronic inflammation.
We need to heal not only the individuals who are harmed but also the systems that make us sick.
Nothing has been more convincing of our interconnectedness than COVID-19 and our climate crisis. We can no longer pretend that what happens somewhere else won’t impact us all.

But it’s not only physical threats we share. Social inequities hurt everyone, too. We are in this together: The inequities experienced by some will poison everyone’s health, even the most privileged.

Simone Schenkman and Aylene Bousquat, researchers at the School of Public Health at Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, compared countries around the world to evaluate the role of inequity in determining health outcomes. Their 2021 study showed that countries with the most inequity of income, education, and health dimensions—regardless of the country’s wealth—had the worst health outcomes.1

Living in an inequitable country doesn’t only affect those with the least privilege; it harms those at the top, too, they found. They concluded that policies that lead to inequities are “a disastrous political choice for society.”

Not only do the inequities lead to poor health outcomes and lower life expectancies for everyone but also higher levels of mental illness, substance use, incarceration, segregation, disrespect, violence, social distrust, and poor cohesion, they showed. “Inequity deteriorates the whole of society and not just the marginalized groups,” they concluded.

The Double-Edged Sword of Inflammation
Scientists now understand how inequity harms our health: because it’s stressful for everyone, says Robert M. Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, who researches how stress damages our biology. “Basically, more unequal societies have a worse quality of life,” he says.2 “When inequality increases, everyone’s health suffers.”

Inequality creates stress, and stress creates the “double-edged biological sword” of inflammation, continues Sapolsky. Our stress response system is an essential adaptation to living in a world of threats around every corner or flick of our phones. When we anticipate a threat, our bodies are built to ramp up inflammatory responses, preparing them to repair the potential wound from a scary creature with big teeth and sharp claws.

Steve Cole, a genomics professor at UCLA, studies how social stresses affect our gene expression. His research, in collaboration with the late John Cacioppo, who was a social scientist at the University of Chicago, provided the first indication that social stress could increase inflammation—at the expense of immune function—in all our body’s cells.

Perceived danger sets off a stress response that signals to every tissue in our bodies to favour inflammation and sacrifice our immune response to get ready for a wounding injury, Cole says.

Cole, Cacioppo, and their colleagues repeated these findings time and time again, identifying the cellular mechanisms of how it happens—that social stress consistently activates a process in our bodies that increases the expression of genes that promote inflammation and decreases the expression of antiviral and antibody-related genes.3

This stress system works well if what we are fighting is a saber-toothed tiger, says Cole, but not if the threat is the complex social stresses that we face in modern society. This is because our stress response isn’t that specific; it’s still largely stuck in the Stone Age by assuming the most helpful response to all threats is preparing the body to heal from a physically wounding injury.

Adaptation is a slow process, and we haven’t yet evolved to the stresses that affect us most in modern society, Cole says—be they emotional or social stresses instead of physical wounds, or the long-term stress of inequities over brief injuries.

When our stress response is constantly going off, our body gets stuck in a state of chronic inflammation, which hurts our bodies and brains. While a brief burst of inflammation can be helpful to repair our body in the short term, countless studies show that chronic inflammation damages our bodies over time, increasing our risk of inflammatory-mediated diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, depression, cancer, and many other illnesses, says Cole.

Molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn joined health psychologist Elissa Epel to study how stress affects the health of our telomeres—the bits at the end of our chromosomes that protect our DNA from damage. The length of our telomeres indicates our biological “age”—a sign of the body’s wear and tear. As we age and our cells divide, our telomeres shorten. Blackburn and Epel’s research kept finding the same conclusion: that stress makes our telomeres shorten faster. And, once again, one of the big stressors we face is inequality, which they found to shorten the telomeres of those on both the top and bottom of unequal societies. They offer a “Telomere Manifesto,” listing ways to protect our telomeres and, thus, aging.4 High on the list? Reduce inequality, they argue.

A Society Inflamed
In medical school, we learned risk factors for illnesses—being Indigenous, for example, was listed as a risk factor for a vast number of health problems, from type 2 diabetes to depression. But it is not an inherent characteristic of being Indigenous to be vulnerable to these health conditions. The health disparities between certain cultural or racial groups can often be explained by the intersecting social and structural determinants of health, such as intergenerational trauma, systemic racism, socioeconomic status, colonialization, exposure to environmental toxins, and access to health care and other resources.

“To wonder why some things settle in some bodies and not others is to begin to ask questions about power, injustice, and inequity,” writes Rupa Marya, a physician and associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and Raj Patel, a public health researcher and professor at the University of Texas, in Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

As the world faced the pandemic, we uncovered the shocking injustices and inequities that we’d been observing for decades, this time in the graves of people who lost their lives to COVID-19. “Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) were over-represented, their bodies subject to inflammation of all kinds, long before the SARS-CoV-2 virus ever settled into their lungs,” argued Marya and Patel. “Not only the lack of access to health care, but systemic social and economic disenfranchisement rendered their bodies more susceptible to Covid when it hit,” they add.

Severe COVID-19 and other inflammatory-mediated conditions are more common in oppressed groups because of the cumulative burdens of toxic stress. And the majority of these stresses are involuntary. No amount of “self-care” or advice to reduce stress or focus on one’s health can erase the weight of systemic and intergenerational oppression. And, yet, so often we blame individuals, groups, or ourselves for poor health.

Perhaps it helps some of us sleep at night to think that we’re healthy because of our own merits, rather than unfairly hoarded privileges. Or maybe we feel more empowered if it’s our own fault that we’re sick, because, then, it's within our power to fix it, even if the added burden of stigma and blame hurts us more.

The only thing harder than recognizing and holding empathy for the unjust distribution of toxic stress that hurts the health of others is carrying these toxins in our own bodies. Inequality hurts us all, but it gravely harms the health of those who are most oppressed.

That’s why social justice is the most important medicine I can prescribe as a physician. Rather than putting Band-Aids on the illnesses caused by inequities to individuals, we need to heal the larger systems that are making them sick. As Seth Godin advises, “Don’t save the canary. Fix the coal mine.”

Living with Bittersweet Emotions.
A Personal Perspective: Responding to impermanence in the many flavors of life.
Reviewed by Lybi Ma

KEY POINTS-
Life teaches us about impermanence, that the people and things we count on may not always be there for us.
Emotional agility is the capacity to accept our difficult thoughts, emotions, and experiences with courage and self-compassion.
Experiencing mixed emotions can help us create greater meaning in our lives as we face challenges and uncertainties.
As the saying goes, life is sweet. And while we may wish for consistently sweet moments, life often serves us other flavors.

Our lives are sprinkled with tastes of bittersweet moments, sad moments, and moments of loss, moments we did not ask for and cannot control. We live our days immersed in our hectic schedules, striving to get what we want and grasping tightly to what we love. And while sometimes we can hold on, at other times life reminds us that we cannot and will not be able to hang on to what really matters to us. Scared, reluctant, kicking, and screaming, we learn that life is impermanent; and that the people and things we count on may not always be there for us.

Recently, we celebrated my mom’s birthday. In her nineties now, as she nears the closing courses of a long and remarkable life, she occasionally remembers vivid moments, but mostly struggles with the veil of dementia—losses of mind and body that are not performing the way she would want.

My mom is deeply loved by our family—she is mother, mother-in-law, wife, aunt, grandma, and great-grandma—we are the loves of her life. To mark her birthday, those of us in town created a gathering to honor her and celebrate. Given my mom’s current circumstances, the party was brief but meaningful. Mostly, it was an opportunity for the grandkids and great-grands to share a few moments with her, which they’ve largely been denied during the limitations of the pandemic.

The day before the celebration, we decided to bake cookies with Mom’s great-grandkids. Not just any cookies, 60 homemade sugar cookies cut in different shapes, covered with homemade frosting in the children’s three favorite colors, and, of course, lots and lots of sprinkles. The kids worked as carefully as they could, resulting in almost as many sprinkles on the floor as on the cookies. They labored with intention and love for hours—rolling dough, baking, cutting shapes, and decorating—with frosting and not one, but four kinds of sprinkles.

The next day, the birthday gathering was a success—love, joy, connection—and the beautiful cookies with icing and sprinkles were shared with great-grandma and each other. And the sprinkles continue to sparkle. In an unexpected way, those sweet sprinkles have remained not only on my mind but most everywhere in our home for the past few days. On every floor and in every room, I continue to find them graced with the love of children and their great-grandma—in all the colors of the rainbow, four shapes and sizes—sweet, and after I inadvertently step on them, not so sweet. Truly, these are bittersweet moments, filled with colorful and mixed emotions. As I continue to discover candied sprinkles, I contemplate my relationship with this time in my life filled with joy and also loss, the small day-to-day losses, and the anticipated big loss to come.

How do we navigate the sweetness and bittersweetness of our inner and outer worlds—pivoting between the mixed emotions of happiness and well-being, change, loss, and the search for meaning?

Amid this bittersweetness, we reluctantly learn that much in life is beyond our sphere of control—we cannot control what others do, the separations and losses, the passage of time, the impermanence of life, what we long for and cannot attain. And yet, in the face of life’s poignant bittersweet sorrows and longings, we muddle on, seeking happiness, connection, and light. Life is in constant transformation and we can choose our attitudes, actions, and responses on the journey.

While my mom’s mind and body are gradually fading on her journey, I believe her spirit is more vibrant than ever, with multi-colored textures and light sprinkled through a long, colorful, and meaningful life. The stories I tell myself in this chapter of her life and mine blend joy and grief, sweetness and bittersweetness, light and dark. Harvard Medical School psychologist, Susan David, Ph.D., teaches about emotional agility, the capacity to acknowledge and accept our difficult thoughts, emotions, and experiences; not dwelling on them, but learning with courage and self-compassion. According to Susan David, emotionally agile people deal with circumstances as they arise, feel the experience fully but loosely, and then move past them to invigorate resilience and our response to change (David, 2016).

Research reveals that experiencing mixed emotions, balancing pleasant and less pleasant feelings, can have a positive effect on the sense that one’s life has meaning and purpose, and eudemonic well-being (Cain, 2022; Berrios, et al, 2017). In Greek, eudaimonia means to live in sync with your highest self, with what matters to you in the deepest ways. Thus, experiencing mixed emotions dispersed in the messiness of our lives can help us create profound meaning in the face of life’s uncertainties. This process beckons us toward well-being and positive affect as we attempt to navigate and transcend our challenges and difficulties in uniquely personal ways.

In the changing seasons of life, we may find ourselves all too aware of fragility, our own and each other's. We find ourselves immersed in life’s impermanence, at the edges of a mystery that we come to understand is undeniable.

As life proceeds, we reluctantly learn in deeply personal ways that change is inevitable:

the vulnerability of everyone and everything we care about
that our time together can be beautiful, but will undeniably end in one way or another
that we may want more, but cannot always have it
And that life serves up many flavors, and we can strive to move toward acceptance. For the sweet, bittersweet, and, yes, the difficult, painful moments we are served are the essence of the human condition.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. No content is a substitute for consulting with a qualified mental health or healthcare professional.