The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

April Snow Brings May Slow, But I Keep On Fighting
The biggest challenge in my life right now is Long COVID. The post exertion malaise leaves me depleted with no extra energy for blogging. All that energy is directed towards my Daddy Duty (I have an adult, learning disabled, autistic child at home) and my current work in progress. Yes, I am writing, and it ’s filled with attitude and humor, but I’m not writing here. Let’s change that.I ’ll start with recent Facebook posts, elaborate on them, and then start charting my progress—perhaps even with a bit of cheek. (Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey)
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - June 29, 2023 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Depression LongCOVID recovering Source Type: blogs

How to Take Charge of Your ADHD Voicemail Hell
Ever find yourself missing important messages because your voicemail box is filled with half a decade of unlistened to calls? There might be a solution for that.Adult ADHD is almost like the Baskin Robbins of the mental health community. There are so many flavors of ADHD, you can be forgiven for questioning if they’re all from the same diagnosis. Some adults with ADHD daydream. Others are chronically late. Some run their mouths off with their feet in the way. Others never stop talking. Some forget why they went to the store. Others forget who they just called because something distracted them after they dialed. There...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - November 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Source Type: blogs

Depression: The Highway to Success Has an Awful Lot of Detours
I’ll write a bit vaguely today because I want to touch upon some things that are family matters and how they impact me.Recently, I have noticed longtime readers of my blog have leapfrogged over me while my life has become stagnant. I caught myself beginning to feel bitter about it, so instead of letting that bitterness settle into depression, I will share some things that I have learned instead.My life took a detour a few years back, if eleven can be called of few. It was as if I was forced to take an exit and found myself on the service road bumping along besides the highway, falling behind all the other traffic. I ...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - November 4, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Depression Family Goodreads Journaling Post-COVID Source Type: blogs

Bookwork Entry 10 – Frustration and Setbacks Plus Unfathomable Optimism
A month has passed since I last updated my journal. I ' m afraid progress has been in short supply, but understanding my obstacles and deciding how to surmount them has made this writing process invaluable. Reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter if you ' ve got something to say about what I ' ve written.(Mobile browsers only display the first page. Please view the text entry after the embedded PDF if you don’t wish to download it.) 25 OCTOBER 2022BOOKWORK 10: It’s been a month since I last checked in. How have I been doing? The website project has come to a stop. I need to fiddle with some settings with my...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - October 27, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Bookwork Depression Journaling Writing Source Type: blogs

Ten Ways to Be Happy with Post-COVID Syndrome (Even If You're Miserable)
Let’s celebrate my one year anniversary since getting COVID–19! 🎉I know people who felt that COVID was a pernicious plot by politicians to put down the populace. I know others who believed that nobody would ever get the virus if they were vaccinated, and anybody not getting vaccinated was trying to kill them. Because of this polarization, I have a hard time talking to people about my experience with Long COVID, orPost-COVID Syndrome as I prefer to call it.Although I have found sympathetic ears out there, they aren’t the norm. The anti-vaccine folks look down on me for masking up and getting vaccinated,...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - October 16, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Depression Goodreads Post-COVID Source Type: blogs

ADHD: It's Not Always Your Fault
Come explore with me the strange intersection of pants and ADHD.Last July, I lost three pairs of pants.As usual, I posted to social media to make light of it, but just between you and me, I stayed up fairly late searching the house like a ninja in search of those pants. Hiding my presence, I moved into almost every room in my home, making no sound as I lifted things, rearranged them, and rifled through them hoping those pants would turn up.I didn’t search the fridge —because that would have been silly—but I searched everywhere else except my roommates’ rooms. It was possible that somebody absconded with my ...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - October 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Source Type: blogs

Bookwork Entry 9
A lot is said about adults with ADHD and their inability to focus, but not enough is said when they ' re focused on the wrong thing. Here I became fixated on adding a certain project to my list of things to do, which was already ridiculously long.(Mobile browsers only display the first page. Please view the text entry after the embedded PDF …) 25 AUGUST 2022Bookwork 9: Did I really want to write a book about Pok émon?Yeah, about that.One of my steady blogging gigs ten years ago was for a gaming site. When that job shriveled up, my love for gaming didn ' t shrivel up with it. I developed a trading system for Pok ém...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - September 25, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Bookwork Journaling Source Type: blogs

Five Ways To Stop Shiny Object Syndrome
Long before“Shiny Object Syndrome” was coined as a term, an insignificant blogger from Utah referred to a similar condition and called it Multi-Irons Syndrome. Are they the same thing?Shiny Object Syndrome — The Fancy Term for Something You’ve Been Doing All Your LifeThere is often a difference between what an expression means when it is coined and how people end up using it. People often don’t see eye to eye on these things. One group will insist on the academic or dictionary usage of a term or word, while the popular usage tromples all over them. Irregardless, we don’t have a lot of contro...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - September 25, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Depression Goodreads Source Type: blogs

Experiment with Your Coping Strategies for Better Results
Earlier this year, I admitted to myself that my current coping strategies weren’tfighting off my depression as effectively as they were before. Had they simply stopped working, or had something fundamental changed inside of me? The answer was complicated.Obviously, my coping strategies weren’t working since I spent more than half of the days each week struggling to keep my spirits up, but for the longest time, I was too sick to do anything about it. I just limped along waiting to get better. The problem with that plan was that I wasn’t getting better. My depression was fueled by chronic illness. Waiting t...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - September 19, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Depression Goodreads Source Type: blogs

Bookwork Entry 8
After meeting with a care manager at the University of Utah ' s COVID Long Hauler clinic, I gained some new information that explained what I ' ve been going through this year. I ' ve been needlessly hard on myself for not getting over something that has impacted me greatly and will continue to impact me greatly for months to come.I also point out recent successes, which shows me that this was a good project to undertake. I will overcome this illness. I will make my goals. This journal is helping me analzye things that have been overwhelming me for some time as well as allowing me to rethink overly agressive goals that may...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - September 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Bookwork Journaling Writing Source Type: blogs

ADHD: Brain Fog Is No Laughing Matter. Well, Maybe Just a Little
Call it brain fog, absentmindedness, or a senior moment, but sometimes when your ADHD brain goes on the fritz, you’ve just got to laugh.I am here today to tell you that playing Sudoku dailywill not improve brain fog. I know. I’ve tried multiple Sudoku books& apps, Sudoku with words, and there’s a Sudoku game out there for the Nintendo Switch that would let me play with fluffy blobs of cats, but I’m not entirely convinced that will work either.Adults with ADHD deal with brain fog on a general basis, so over the years I figured doing mental activities to improve my concentration and presence of mi...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - September 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Source Type: blogs

ADHD Fixation: The Dark Side of Hyperfocus
A lot is made of ADHD’s super power of hyperfocus. I’ve written about it onseveraloccasions over the years as well. I’ve even created aToDo List technique to simulate it!Should we really label hyperfocus as a superpower, though? I have always been painfully aware ofthe downsides to hyperfocus. I’ll even avoid undertaking certain tasks because I know that I’ll slip into hyperfocus and loose track of time and the events around me. It’s not always a desirable state of mind to be in.Normally,adults with adhd might as well be hamsters on a wheel, furiously running, but not getting anywhere. S...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - August 27, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Source Type: blogs

Bookwork Entry 7
This process may seem dull, but it works extremely well for me, especially since I ' m dealing with Post-COVID brain fog. Writing slowly by hand is helping me sort out my thoughts. In this entry, I decided the fate of the second novel. It ' s nice to imagine that I can simultaneously write two novels while blogging weekly while juggling Great White sharks and chainsaws on a unicycle, but I have to be honest with myself.(Mobile browsers only display the first page. Please view the text entry after the embedded PDF …) 24 AUGUST 2022Bookwork 7: Family visits and fatigue have halted the geeky server work. I hope to get ...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - August 25, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Bookwork Journaling Writing Source Type: blogs

Bookwork Entry 6
Here ' s another thrilling tech-heavy entry as I battle the evil forces of drudgery, then I ask myself an important question: Why don ' t I make things easy for myself and just delete it all? It ' s tempting, but then I ' d lose a few thousand or so links back to my blog. It would be a little like blowing up the airport on a remote island.The formatting in this entry is a little off. I take a .nebo notebook file from my Kobo Elipsa, open it in Nebo on my iPad, then export it as a PDF. The Elipsa supports an earlier version of Nebo ' s library that can create a pretty wild HTML copy of the journal entry using vector coordin...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - August 13, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Source Type: blogs

Bookwork Entry 5
The technical hurdles have been overcome, and I come to a decision regarding blogging. This is a slow process, but I ' m glad I ' m going through it. Regardless ofMulti-Irons Syndrome, I need to focus on only one or two projects if I want to publish a book by the end of the year.This is a journal I am writing on my Kobo Elipsa eReader. (Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey)
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - August 13, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Bookwork Journaling Source Type: blogs