depression
It is not just a matter of feeling sad; discover an honest view of the mental, emotional and physical toll of clinical depression.
The Witness Staff
The Witness Staff A real soul passed through this The Fantasy That Protects Your Back “If I had the strength today, I’d be rummaging through my closet and drawers, hunting for scraps of ribbon, old beads, forgotten feathers anything to dress my walking stick the way the old stories describe. But my back has already carried too much, and the film still waits unprocessed. So instead, I imagine the decorated staffs of the ancestors: ember wood, wind caller, moon thread sticks glowing in the dark. Mine will come later. For now, the fantasy is enough.” I will decorate my regular walking sticks soon.
By Vicki Lawana Trusselli about 4 hours ago in Psyche
The House of Two Worlds
The Cinematic Doorway Intro I finished shaping this piece in a quiet room today, letting the story settle into its own rhythm. This is the next chapter in the House of Two Worlds a moment caught between shadow and clarity, where the rooms speak in their own language. I included the long story and the summary of the words placed with music and spoken word. This is a debut to houses divided. There are many different lifestyles. An artist needs a creative environment. However, with rents so damn high everyone cannot live alone to create. Living in a paint bucket of music, art, and film is a struggle with a more conformist individual. Life is short. Life can be real.
By Vicki Lawana Trusselli about 9 hours ago in Psyche
Drip by Drip, I Disappeared. AI-Generated.
I used to think exhaustion was something you could sleep off. That if I just pushed through one more day, one more week, I would eventually “catch up” with myself. But at some point, I stopped recognizing the person doing the pushing.
By Jude Ankrah2 days ago in Psyche
Divine Expression
For the last six years, I have been walking through this life in a solitary fashion. I have been searching for something I could never fully put into words, yet would be recognized when it was attained. A spiritual calling that has followed me throughout my life since I was a child. Once I found my significant other, or better said, once she found me, my spiritual path was inadvertently put on standby.
By Kaylon Forsyth2 days ago in Psyche
American Loneliness
THE COUNTRY THAT FORGOT HOW TO CONNECT 📱 America is experiencing a loneliness crisis so severe that in 2023 Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared it a public health epidemic comparable in health impact to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily, and the statistics behind this declaration paint a picture of a nation that has achieved unprecedented technological connectivity while simultaneously producing unprecedented levels of social disconnection: approximately one in two Americans reports experiencing measurable loneliness, the average American has fewer close friends than at any point since tracking began with the number declining from an average of three close friends in 1990 to an average of two in 2021 and with a significant percentage reporting zero close friends, time spent in person with friends has decreased by approximately twenty-four hours per month compared to two decades ago, membership in community organizations including churches, civic groups, and social clubs has declined by approximately twenty-five percent, and young adults aged eighteen to twenty-five report the highest loneliness levels of any demographic despite being the most digitally connected generation in history 📊😢
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Psyche
Psychology
EXPERIMENT 1: THE INVISIBLE GORILLA 🦍 In 1999 psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment that would become one of the most famous demonstrations of human cognitive limitation ever produced: they asked participants to watch a video of six people passing basketballs and to count the number of passes made by the team wearing white shirts, and approximately halfway through the video a person in a gorilla suit walked into the frame, faced the camera, beat their chest, and walked off, and when asked afterward whether they noticed anything unusual approximately fifty percent of participants reported seeing nothing out of the ordinary, completely failing to detect a gorilla that was visible on screen for a full nine seconds while they were focused on counting basketball passes 🏀
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Psyche
The Second Brain
THE INTELLIGENCE YOU NEVER KNEW YOU HAD 🧬 There is a nervous system in your digestive tract that contains approximately five hundred million neurons, more than your spinal cord and more than any other organ system outside your brain, and this network called the enteric nervous system or colloquially the second brain operates with such autonomy that it can function completely independently of the brain in your skull, controlling digestion, producing neurotransmitters, communicating with your immune system, and influencing your emotional state through pathways that neuroscientists are only beginning to understand, and the discovery that your gut contains a nervous system complex enough to deserve the label brain has transformed our understanding of the relationship between what you eat, how you feel, and who you are in ways that challenge the Western assumption that identity and consciousness reside exclusively in the head while the body below the neck is merely a transport system for the brain above it 🧠💡
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Psyche
The Emotion
How Unfelt Feelings Become Physical Symptoms THE BODY THAT SPEAKS WHEN THE MOUTH WON'T 🗣️ The migraine that appears every Sunday evening before the work week begins, the back pain that flares during family visits, the stomach problems that intensify during relationship conflict, the skin conditions that worsen during periods of unexpressed anger, and the chronic fatigue that has no medical explanation despite extensive testing are not coincidences or imaginary complaints but rather your body's attempt to communicate emotional information that your conscious mind refuses to process, because the body and mind are not separate systems but are two expressions of a single integrated organism, and emotions that are suppressed from conscious awareness do not disappear but rather are rerouted through the autonomic nervous system into physical symptoms that serve as the body's protest against the emotional censorship your psychological defenses impose 🏥
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Psyche
Your Brain
The Neuroscience of Letting Go of Thoughts That Don't Serve You THE MENTAL CLUTTER DESTROYING YOUR LIFE 🧹 Your brain contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons forming trillions of connections that collectively produce every thought, memory, emotion, and behavior you experience, and like any system of this complexity it accumulates clutter over time in the form of neural pathways that were once useful but that no longer serve you, thought patterns established during childhood that were adaptive responses to childhood circumstances but that have become maladaptive in adult life, emotional reactions calibrated to threats that no longer exist, and habitual mental processes that consume cognitive resources without producing useful outputs, and this neural clutter which you experience as persistent negative self-talk, automatic anxiety responses, ruminative thought loops, and emotional reactivity that seems disproportionate to the situations triggering it, is not a permanent feature of your psychology but rather a collection of neural pathways that can be weakened and eventually eliminated through a process neuroscientists call synaptic pruning, the brain's built-in mechanism for deleting connections that are not being reinforced through use 🧠✨
By The Curious Writer4 days ago in Psyche
