by Monica A. Coleman | Oct 15, 2011 | Blog, Media, Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
Writer and mental health advocate Therese Borchard interviewed me and it made it to the Huffington Post. Check it out. According to Raymond DePaulo, Jr. M.D., Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, African-American populations do not...
by Monica A. Coleman | Oct 9, 2011 | Blog, Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
When I was a teenager, I liked a boy who attempted suicide. I remember calling his home on an ordinary day. His mother answered the phone and told me a harrowing story of how she came home, and found his tall lanky body in the bathtub with blood spilling into the...
by Monica A. Coleman | Oct 4, 2011 | Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
I know that men wrote the Bible. That’s no surprise to anyone who has had a brush with feminism or biblical scholarship. But there are times when one is more aware of this than at other times. As I mourn the loss of my miscarried babies, I think of how the Bible...
by Monica A. Coleman | Sep 26, 2011 | Blog, Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
I wanted to be pregnant if only for the possibility of helpful hormones. “Pregnancy is great for some women with depression,” my psychiatrist says. “The hormones can help.” I think of my women friends with depression who tell me that pregnancy nearly killed them. That...
by Monica A. Coleman | Sep 19, 2011 | Blog, Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
I grew up in a state of unionized workers. My mother was in a teachers’ union. My father worked for one of the “Big Three” automakers and UAW is an acronym every Michigander knows. Every year, there were talks of negotiations and talks of strikes. The only thing worse...
by Monica A. Coleman | Sep 14, 2011 | Blog, Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
My parents called it “talking back.” Some people call it “sassing.” It’s that willful behavior that children have when they just have to respond to what they’ve been told—sometimes with attitude, snarky upturn of lip or obvious petulance. The admonition not to “talk...
by Monica A. Coleman | Sep 12, 2011 | Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
A lot of religions consider blood to be an appropriate sacrifice to God or gods. Kill the fatted lamb, say scriptures in the Hebrew Bible. Lay the ram on the altar – instead of your son, God tells Abraham. Place the blood upon your doorposts, and the angel of death...
by Monica A. Coleman | Sep 8, 2011 | Blog, Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
I long became comfortable with bleeding. The Red Tent, Honoring Menstruation and Sacred Woman guided me into a healthy relationship with my womanhood, my womb and the cycles of the moon. I didn’t know what to do when I stopped bleeding. It felt like weeks before I got...
by Monica A. Coleman | Sep 6, 2011 | Blog, Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog
I grew up in the 1980s before AIDS was called HIV. My closest friends and I were trained to be deathly afraid of unprotected sex. At worst, you would get AIDS and die. And best, you got pregnant and there went your career dreams. Or so we believed as we sat around the...
by Monica A. Coleman | Aug 31, 2011 | Monica's Blog, The Beautiful Mind Blog, Uncategorized
If you’ve been following my blog, you’ve noticed that I’ve been really quiet lately. Like all summer lately. What’s up with that? Well, part of the challenge of writing about depression is that it’s hard to write when depressed, and, well, depression happens. But I’m...