Blog
Mental Health Writings
Recent articles to illuminate your inner world.
September 26, 2026
Why it becomes harder to build healthy relationships without coming to terms with our parents' shortcomings
The way parents described their childhood and their infants' attachment patterns showed 75 percent agreement across 661 pairs; kappa was 0.49, indicating moderate agreement. 🧠 The Adult Attachment Interview assesses not what happened in childhood, but how it is described today. Even when negative experiences are described, if the narrative is coherent, the assessment indicates secur
September 26, 2026
Three directions of idealization in narcissism: the past, the future, and the other
Narcissism is not simply about admiring oneself excessively. Idealization is sometimes directed toward the past, sometimes toward the future, and sometimes toward another person. 🕰️ Akhtar describes two familiar fantasies. “If only” glorifies the past: “If that hadn't happened, my life would have been different.” “Someday” glorifies the future: “Someday everyone
September 25, 2026
Janina Fisher and parts in trauma: staying aware of our parts
After complex trauma, the mind sometimes functions not as a unified whole, but as insufficiently integrated parts. This is how the theory of structural dissociation describes it. 🧩 In this theory, one part carries on with everyday life: going to work, running the household. Another remains stuck in the traumatic experience, even after the danger has passed
September 25, 2026
Choose your pain and be willing to experience it.
Choose your pain and be willing to face it. We cannot live without being willing to experience pain. The pain we run from does not diminish; it merely shifts: when we escape into our careers, our families bleed; when we escape into our families, our careers do. After a while, both doors are forgotten, and we are left in between. To rejoice if it ends well, to grieve if it ends badly. Kö
September 25, 2026
1779 posters and 4 presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry (WCP 2026, Stockholm)
I have compiled Turkish summaries of the 1,779 posters and 443 talks presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry (WCP 2026, Stockholm) on a single page. They can be filtered by topic, presentation type, and country. Each card lists the presenter, their institution, and their country, with ready-to-use APA 7 and Vancouver citations below. 59 studies from Türkiye
September 25, 2026
Exercise prescription in psychiatry: how frequency, intensity, duration, and supervision are described in the literature
An exercise dose can be prescribed for mental disorders: at least 3 sessions per week, each lasting 30 to 60 minutes, with moderate intensity as the baseline. 🧠 A 2025 umbrella review combining 103 meta-analyses and 364,889 participants found a moderate overall effect of physical activity on mental disorders: effect size
September 23, 2026
Medication is not the first recommendation for mild depression.
Medication is not the first recommendation for mild depression. The UK's NICE guideline (2022) does not recommend antidepressants as a first-line option for mild depression, except when the patient specifically requests them—not routinely. Instead, one of the options at the top of the list is regular physical activity: half an hour, three days a week, if poss
September 23, 2026
Grief is not a five-stage checklist to be ticked off in order. A Yale stud
Grief is not a five-stage checklist to be ticked off in order. In a Yale study of 233 people, acceptance was the most common response from the very first month. "While I thought I was learning how to live, I was learning how to die." This sentence, compiled from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, relates to the central idea of my book Şairler ve Psikoterapistler Gözüyle Yas
September 23, 2026
Perfectionism is often described as a virtue. Being meticulous, liking ord
Perfectionism is often described as a virtue. Being meticulous, liking order, and doing your job well are indeed valuable. But when do these same traits stop working for us and start making us work for them? Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder lies precisely at this boundary. The lists never end, work cannot be delegated, "
September 23, 2026
Attention deficit or attention dysregulation in ADHD: where the inability to disengage from an engaging task fits in the literature
What is measured in ADHD is not an absence of focus: hyperfocus scores in 132 adult patients at two clinics were higher than in controls. 🧠 Ozel-Kizil et al. describe hyperfocus as an inability to shift attention away from an engaging event and suggest that it may be defined as a distinct dimension of adult ADHD
September 22, 2026
The abandonment schema: the behavioral patterns that emerge from schema surrender, schema avoidance, and overcompensation
The abandonment schema is not a fear but an expectation: the expectation that someone you become close to will one day leave. 🧠 The abandonment (instability) schema belongs to the disconnection and rejection domain. A meta-analysis found a correlation of r = 0.25 between emotional neglect and this schema in adolescents (May et al., 2022). In 426 people
September 21, 2026
For some people, order feels less like a preference and more like a necessity.
For some people, order feels less like a preference and more like a necessity. When papers are not aligned, an inner unease begins. The work is finished, but "good enough" never seems to arrive. Rest is postponed because something needs to be finished first, and that list never ends. It would not be right to describe this as a flaw