CBSN and the MindFest 2017 Experience
Wednesday, we went to MindFest, a one-day mental health convention. It was held at the Hart House on the University of Toronto campus, which, let me just say, was a gorgeous venue.
BFRB Week 2017 Guest Blog Series: Kimi
A Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviour Awareness Week tradition here at CBSN is to gather guest blogs to share throughout the week. In the past, we’ve gotten a variety of narratives from BFRBers across the world. This week, we have four...
BFRB Week Guest Blog 2017 Series: Francesca
A Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviour Awareness Week tradition here at CBSN is to gather guest blogs to share throughout the week. In the past, we’ve gotten a variety of narratives from BFRBers across the world. This week, we have four...
8 BFRB Back-to-School Tips
In the past, I’ve written about back-to-school tips I would recommend, but this time around, I thought I’d ask the body-focused repetitive behaviour (BFRB) community for their take on how to prepare for back-to-school. BFRBs are hard enough to...
Accepting the Hard Realities of BFRBs
In the body-focused repetitive behaviour community, many people who have a BFRB or multiple BFRBs are searching for a cure. And if not a cure specifically, all of us are looking for answers of some sort—causes, triggers, what helps,...
Things I Wish I Had Been Told About Dermatillomania
Inspired by a blog on The Mighty about things the blogger wished she had been told about mental illness, I thought let’s delve into what we wished we had been told about body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs), starting with dermatillomania....
Stop Fighting Amongst Ourselves: Behaviour-Free vs Acceptance
It’s becoming more and more evident to me that there’s a stark divide between two different philosophies when it comes to body-focused repetitive behaviours. One the one side of things, we have community members who strive to be behaviour-free....
SkinPick.com’s New Self-Monitoring App
This guest blog was written by Tasneem Abrahams, a CBT therapist who treats BFRB clients, mainly with skin excoriation disorder and trichotillomania. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to have the most effective results for helping people with BFRBs...
BFRBs and Suicidal Thoughts
I was thinking the other day how strange it is that despite the body-focused repetitive behaviour community being part of the larger mental health community, there are still some topics that don’t get discussed. It’s especially strange considering how...
BFRB Representation at the World Health Innovation Summit in London, England!
Good news for our mental health friends across the pond! This year the lovely Liz Atkin will be representing the BFRB community at the World Health Innovation Summit in London, England as an Ambassador! I first met Liz this past April at...
Picking Me: Bringing Awareness to Dermatillomania
“I used to cringe when I would hear the word ‘pick.’ It could be pick a colour, it could be pick a direction, pick a college, it didn’t really matter.” Lauren McKeaney’s story with skin picking started out like...
BFRBs and Desirability
In today’s world there’s a constant war between aesthetics or outward appearance and inward beauty. Seeing as we’re constantly bombarded by largely unattainable beauty standards and a narrow view of what beauty is, people rebel with ads and messages...
Stop Thinking You’re The Only One
I hope this blog, the first after a long period of silence, doesn’t come across too awfully, but there’s something that bugs me about the community. It’s a bit of a rant, I guess you could say. “Am I...
Tips for Making THE Facebook Post
All of us in the BFRB community seem to consider making that monumental Facebook post. It seems to feel like our tell-all novel of our BFRB(s) in post form, where we say I have trichotillomania, dermatillomania, onychophagia, dermatophagia, trichotemnomania...
Living with Dermatillomania and Dermatophagia
My first memory of my BFRB was back in the fourth grade when I was about nine or ten and had just lost my cousin to a car accident and had just begun to suffer from intrusive thoughts as...