Mental Illness: Symptoms, Causes & Treatment Options

Brain fog with fibromyalgia and depression

The Spanish study in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology called “Cognitive complaints in women with fibromyalgia: Are they due to depression or to objective cognitive dysfunction?” recurited105 women with fibromyalgia for their analysis. Fibromyalgia is characterized by widespread pain, cognitive dysfunction, sleep dysfunction and fatigue. However, the cognitive dysfunction of fibrofog with its concentration issues has not always been thought of to be from the FM. Studies have shown it is from the…

by chronicillness•08/19/202208/23/2025•0

So you have a chronic illness. Is that a disability?

If it means significant restrictions to your daily activities, then, according to medical and government guidelines, yes, you have a disability. This may challenge the ability stereotypes you might have absorbed from the media, where disability is usually linked to the need to use a wheelchair because of a spinal cord injury or limb impairment. This might get you wondering about what exactly the definition of disability is, how do we usually understand it and…

by chronicillness•08/15/202208/23/2025•0

A Woman To Be Remembered for Fibromyalgia

The world lost a woman yesterday.A boy lost his grandmother, three people lost their mother and a man lost his wife.This woman was a pistol, tough and strong and a force to be reckoned with.I grew up with her tales of adventure, living overseas while young and newly married, her husband in the military.I learned of a day in 1929 when this girl took a shoebox of money she was saving to the bank, to…

by chronicillness•08/10/202208/23/2025•0

Trigger warnings for the fibromyalgia mind

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear” , Mark Twain Neuroscientists can now tell us amazing things about the brain, they are the experts on the nervous system. The argument that there is or is not a ‘mind’ is no longer relevant. A mind without a brain and a brain without a nervous system are not feasible. It is the mind that alerts us to fear, which may or not be…

by chronicillness•07/06/202208/23/2025•0

Writing about Fibromyalgia: The psychological and physiological effects

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”, Maya Angelou A very interesting interview a while ago on CBC Radio with Michael Enright as host. Dr. Suzanne Koven, who is a Massachusetts General Hospital Writer-in-Residence and a primary care doctor, writes, teaches, and speaks about the healing power of story writing. She was Enright’s guest. It has allowed me to ponder upon my own need to write about fibromyalgia and in turn for others to comment…

by chronicillness•07/04/202208/23/2025•1

Fibromyalgia and Brain Fog: Stop, Breathe & Think

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery-always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud”, Virginia Woolf To live a life in a state of high anxiety, boarding on panic is common among those of us with fibromyalgia. We anticipate pain, fatigue, muddled thoughts, and a myriad of other symptoms almost every waking (and sleeping!) hour. It has become a habit that often seems unable to be broken and…

by chronicillness•07/02/202208/23/2025•0

Fibromyalgia and the tendency toward anxiety

“When anxious people anticipate something bad about to happen- such as being confronted with creepy pictures of snakes or spiders- their right frontal insulas go into overdrive”, Blakeslee and Blakeslee Many of us with fibromyalgia can remember childhood as the beginning of a lifetime of fear, and anxiety. Since there might have been a significant childhood episode that triggered this dis-ease called fibromyalgia, it stayed with us while other troublesome events in our lives piled…

by chronicillness•06/29/202208/23/2025•0

Fibromyalgia and brain ‘zaps’

“There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me”, Pink Floyd Just as I thought that I had nothing new to write about I have discovered that the weird ‘brain’ sensations I have, which only last for moments, are common among those of us with this frustrating condition of fibromyalgia! I have had these peculiar short-lived experiences that are followed by dizziness for several years now. The episodes are almost like a small temporary memory loss, almost feeling…

by chronicillness•06/11/202208/23/2025•0

Fibromyalgia is an anxiety disorder

” People who are prone to anxiety are nearly always people-pleasers who fear conflict and negative feelings like anger”, David D. Burns Everyone worries, it falls under the umbrella of anxiety. It is not about living in the moment but rather it is about looking back in the past where it all began and into a future that is pure fantasy. Those of us with excessive anxiety are prone to catastrophic thinking, our thoughts go…

by chronicillness•06/08/202208/23/2025•0

Fibromyalgia, my unquiet mind

” The mind is the most capricious of insects-flitting, fluttering”, Virginia Woolf Sit quietly for a minute and imagine this stream with leaves quietly floating by in the water. Now think of the many thoughts, that are like a barrel full of monkeys, aggravating your mind, flitting around uncontrollably. With each thought (or monkey) that arises, a place that thought on a leaf and imagines it floating away. The thoughts will come non-stop, but in…

by chronicillness•06/05/202208/23/2025•6