I have a headache for every occasion. I have one for depression, one for insomnia, and so on. Crucially, there is a specific headache I experience whenever I feel suffocated because I’m not getting my required space. That ache has plagued me for months now.

I always feel guilty about that. About needing distance between myself and the people I love. Do I truly love them if I need a certain degree of separation between us? Such introspection predictably devolves into me thinking I’m a bad person. That is, until I remember good and bad are perspectives, not facts.

Whenever…

I don’t generally watch movies or television shows. My preferred media are books and video games. Nevertheless, once in a while I do feel like enjoying something on the big screen. But given that the pandemic is still raging in India (the last movie I watched in an actual theater was Tenet, and only three people attended), it is to streaming platforms I must turn.

I don’t have Netflix, because what would I need Netflix for? I do have an Amazon Prime subscription, and so I open up Prime Video from time to time. …

Note: This article is not meant to harm any religious or spiritual sentiments. If it does, I sincerely apologize. Musings on religion (and which one is “superior”) or the existence of God are simply not areas this piece aims to cover. It is written for the mentally ill who involuntarily feel sexually attracted toward a deity and are plagued by shame because of it.

In terms of mental health awareness, we as a society have come a long way. From dismissing depression as mere laziness to it being considered a comorbidity in some countries, the progress is undeniable. …

The Metro series had popped up on my radar years ago, but I never played it until the past two weeks. Although I could cite various reasons behind that, it ultimately came down to fear. There is something about the visual of a person in a gas mask I find inherently frightening and repugnant.

During my eight-year stay at Mental Illness University, I majored in clinical depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and panic disorder. But I also took forays into other specializations from time to time. One such (mis)adventure was psychosis.

Author Markus MacGill, who served on the editorial team at Medical News Today and has worked with clients such as the World Health Organization, defines psychosis as follows:

Psychosis involves a loss of contact with reality and can feature hallucinations and delusions. It is a symptom of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but there are many other causes.

While I did experience some pretty heavy…

I have long searched for a stable morning routine that brings my senses to alert and hones them for the sixteen-odd hours ahead. Especially in the present scenario, I want to utilize every hour of every day in order to maximize my potential and subsequent output.

For me, there is no excuse anymore. Before, it was that I spent the morning and sometimes the whole afternoon in college. Now, I am home all day. There is nothing I can say that will justify not getting work done. Productivity-wise, this is an extremely fertile time, perhaps never to be repeated.

So…

There is one book I bought sometime last year. It is called The Politics and is authored by Aristotle. It was a spur-of-the-moment purchase made alongside Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore. While I completed the latter, I kept putting off the former. Now, it has been consigned to my bookshelf for over six months. It acts as the perfect example of my reading conundrum.

I began reading novels at four, and since then have consumed roundabout eight or nine per year. It should be way higher, but after my clinical depression diagnosis at fourteen, I couldn’t concentrate on reading for years…

You’ll often hear people complaining they are ‘a little OCD’ or ‘completely crazy, bro.’ Talking in this manner has become all too common of late, and I have never looked kindly upon loosely using mental health terms without a proper diagnosis.

But where there is smoke, there is fire. What if these utterings have substance to them? I mean, there’s a name for everything these days. You Google how you feel and are immediately led to a website full of information about your possible condition.

Specifically, I became curious about personality disorders. Everybody seems to put their Myers-Briggs type in…