Hey, welcome to the Therapy Thoughts podcast. This is Tiffany Rowe. I'm a licensed clinical mental health

counselor and psychology teacher. I own mindful counseling in ORM, Utah, and I'm on a mission to

break down mental health stigma. Therapy Thoughts is a podcast all about helping you love yourself

and make peace with your mind, body, and food. I'll share some education, tips, interviews, and tools from my

clinical experience so you can improve your mental health. Stay tuned as we change the mental

health game and talk all about therapy. What's up? my therapy thoughts people? Today I want to give you a special episode of the

Therapy Thoughts podcast. It is World Mental Health Day. And it's time for us to banish the stigma around mental health. It's time to get educated.

It's time to talk about mental illness. So I want to dedicate this entire episode to informing you,

giving you some education, because that's a crucial part of overcoming the stigma around mental health and hopefully answer

some frequently asked questions so that you can move forward and educate others and understand

your own mental health. This is going to be a mini abnormal psychology class. Now the word

abnormal can be, you know, taken with offense or maybe, uh, there's some negativity around

that. But I want to help you understand how we use the word abnormal in, uh, a psychological

context. So I'm going to try to quantify that for you and hopefully give you some ideas to

think about.

Abnormal psychology. It's a scientific study.

It's a way that we study troublesome feelings and thoughts and behaviors associated with mental disorders.

It's an area of science and it's designed to help us evaluate and understand and predict and prevent mental disorder and to help people in distress. So it's not, the point is not to separate normal from abnormal.

Really what we're trying to do is understand people who fall outside of the majority of people's experiences. So we use the word

abnormal. But we all fall on a spectrum of mental illness. This isn't an us versus them issue.

We all have symptoms. And you'll hear me say this a lot that it's not a

matter of do we have it or don't we have it when it comes to mental illness. It's a matter of

...