Psykart's mental health clinic
Provides expert counseling and therapy tailored to individual needs, promoting emotional well-being and resilience. Compassionate professionals offer a safe space for healing and growth.


Follow Us On- https://www.instagram.com/p/C4zlQBGL0DL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
contact us : https://psykart.com/ or +91 7428729797
Psykart Clinic in Sector 50 - https://maps.app.goo.gl/tgCZAgGPgSM3GY6m7
#PsykartWellness #MindfulHealing #TherapyJourney #MentalHealthMatters #EmotionalResilience #CounselingSupport #InnerPeaceQuest #WellnessClinic

When Hope Feels Unreachable.
How to keep realistic hope without self-deception.

KEY POINTS-
Hope is a skill we all can cultivate.
Depression and other mental illness can distort our sense of hope.
Strategies such as letting go of fixed expectations and embracing small joys can help us build hope.
I remember sitting alongside a friend who had been through all things imaginable. I let her know how much I respected her strength. She tilted her head letting me know, "You don't get a choice. It wasn't my strength that got me through, it was hope." That stuck with me.

In ways, hope is like a small candle glowing in a dark room. Just a little hope goes a long way. It's a dangerous little thing though. Tilt it too far toward an expectation, you risk getting burned. As a therapist, I meet with people in all kinds of circumstances. I've sat with grieving families, individuals with addictions, people facing legal problems, and people facing mental illness. Hope can mean millions of things.

The beginning of my career focused on suicide prevention through crisis intervention. Perhaps the greatest predictor of suicide is hopelessness. Hopelessness gives a sense of futility to anything. Sometimes people land in hopelessness when a specific wish is vanquished like when a relationship has ended, when someone who had hoped to regain contact with a child is denied this, or when serious damage to one's life goals.

A View of the Future
Yet, in my work, I have also seen people remember hope. Genuine hope does not have to be linked to any one specific expectation. We can have hopes just for today. Hope to stand outside and enjoy the sun. A hope to refrain from an addictive substance or behavior. We can also have hope that tomorrow we will feel a greater sense of hope than we have in the past. Keeping flexibility in our hope makes hope more realistic. Our hopes can change from day to day.

Depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges can temporarily blind us to the presence of hope. Like a reverse fun house mirror, depression, and anxiety distort our views of the future. This has been confirmed through research showing that people with depression were less accurate in rating how they would feel in four days than those not experiencing depression (Zetsche and colleagues, 2019). Unsurprisingly, participants with depression rated their mood to be poorer than it would be. Hope has also been found to correlate positively with quality of life in individuals living with serious mental illness Mashiach-Eizenberg and colleagues, 2013).

Gaining insight into these illusions that mental health challenges place on our hope is key to recovery. Reaching out to supportive others in these times is key. Friends, family, and mental health clinicians can help you to regain perspective. Noticing small positive things like the sounds of the birds or a smile from a stranger are also ways to challenge your mind's deception.

Hopeful and Healthy
Hope is linked to more active health behaviors, which make us healthier (Greene and colleagues, 2015). Hope may also independently support more favorable health outcomes. Building a sense of hope is also an important part of counseling in palliative care. The person may not have hope to live for another 30 years, but they can hope for other things like having a meaningful conversation or enjoying a sunset.

We all need hope. Leaning into our values, letting go of rigid expectations, embracing uncertainty, and noticing ways that our minds may play tricks on us are ways to cultivate it. Hope is a skill anyone can build. If you are feeling low on hope, you are not alone. Many have felt this way and gotten through it. Perhaps you have even felt this way in the past and have gotten through it. Help is available. There is always hope.

The Cost of Staying Silent and the Cost of Speaking Up.
Personal Perspective: We still don't talk easily about mental illness.
Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

My new boss calls me periodically to let me know about her struggles to find her optimal dose of Zoloft. I would never disclose to her that I take two antidepressants as well as a second-generation antipsychotic. Why? Because there is still a stigma against mental illness in the workplace — especially severe mental illness. It’s one thing to find out your new employee suffered from depression, yet another thing to discover she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Kaiser Permanente states that untreated depression costs $9,450 per employee per year in absenteeism and lost productivity. Why, especially within the field of mental health, is it not okay to be dealing with a mental illness? In my very first position out of college, before I became a social worker, I was working at a packaged goods company when I was diagnosed with anorexia. After two psychiatric hospitalizations a year apart I was let go. (This was prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was passed in 1990.)

In my first role as a social worker after five years of being at this clinic, I was hospitalized for depression. When I returned I’d been demoted. Humiliated, I quit. That experience sent me reeling and I plummeted into a severe depressive episode that lasted 18 months.

Why don’t we talk about mental illness as easily as we talk about asthma or a broken wrist? You don’t get demoted or repurposed for being hospitalized for an asthma attack or needing surgery for a fractured wrist. According to Kaiser Permanente, 62% of missed workdays can be attributed to mental health conditions. This is the cost of silence. This is the cost of stigma.

After I recovered from that depressive episode in 2008, I found a position at an outpatient clinic in Queens, NY. I was doing well there until my father passed away in 2013. We didn’t have a good relationship and when he died I lost the chance to hear him tell me I was good enough, words I longed to hear all my life. At the beginning of 2014 I attempted suicide. When I was discharged from the medical and psychiatric hospitals, the director of the clinic forced me to step down to part-time. The clients on my caseload had been transferred to other clinicians. This was a mental health clinic penalizing one of its employees for suffering from a mental illness.

I eventually was reinstated full-time, but never was permitted to see patients again. Instead, I was tasked with administrative work. I immediately began looking for a new job and found one by the end of that year.

After those experiences, I swore to myself that as long as I could help it, I’d never take a chance and disclose my history of mental illness in the workplace again. When I started my new position, my mental health had improved significantly and I was more stable. I haven’t needed to be psychiatrically hospitalized since then, so I haven’t had any extended absences to explain.

I let my writing speak for me, fighting the stigma of mental illness with the power of the written word. I also write to let others know they’re not alone on their journey and that recovery is possible. I’m aware that all someone has to do is Google me and they will find my writing and my history. That’s fine. Silence comes in many forms. So does speaking up.

Thanks for reading.