Alexithymia means emotions are present but hard to identify or name. Here's what it feels like, how it links to autism and interoception, and what actually helps.

Complex PTSD and borderline personality disorder overlap by roughly half. Here is how clinicians tell them apart, why the label shapes your care, and what a careful, trauma-informed assessment involves.

Body-focused repetitive behaviors like hair-pulling and skin-picking are OCD-related but distinct. Learn how they differ and what treatment helps.

Hoarding disorder, OCD, and everyday clutter can look alike but aren't the same. Learn how clinicians tell them apart and why the right diagnosis changes treatment.

Misophonia makes certain sounds trigger rage or panic. Learn why it happens, how it overlaps with autism, OCD, and anxiety, and what actually helps.

ADHD mood swings and bipolar episodes look alike but differ in timing, triggers, and onset. Learn how a careful evaluation tells them apart.

PMDD and perimenopause both bring midlife mood changes and are easy to confuse. The clearest difference is timing: PMDD is cyclical, perimenopause is variable. Here is how to tell them apart and when to get evaluated.

Understand your GAD-7 anxiety score: minimal, mild, moderate, or severe ranges, what a 10+ means, and the next step toward a clinical evaluation.

PHQ-9 measures depression severity, GAD-7 measures generalized anxiety severity, and PROMIS-29 measures seven health domains at once. Here is how to pick the right one for the question you are actually trying to answer — with score cutoffs, clinical meaning, and next steps.

Most people first hear about EMDR as a treatment for PTSD — and the PTSD evidence base is where it has its strongest clinical practice guideline support [1][2]. But clinicians have been using EMDR for non-PTSD anxiety presentations for three decades, and a growing peer-reviewed literature supports i

Last reviewed: 04/09/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you are looking for telehealth therapy options in Tennessee, you may already know you want help but still feel unsure about what kind of help actually fits. That is often the real decision point. Video sessions are only the format. What matters more is whether the care is matched to the problem that is actually keeping you stuck, whether that is OCD, trauma, insomnia, or a more layered picture with overlap.[1][8] The g

Last reviewed: 04/09/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you have ever left a therapy session wondering, "Is this actually helping?" measurement based care in therapy is meant to answer that question in a practical, human way. Instead of relying only on memory or a vague sense of how things are going, you and your therapist use a few simple markers to notice change, spot stuck points, and make better treatment decisions together.[1][3][4] When we use this approach in our spe

Last reviewed: 04/09/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you are looking into motivational interviewing for substance use, there is a good chance you do not want a lecture. You may already know something needs to change, but still feel unsure, defensive, embarrassed, or simply tired of being pushed. That is exactly the kind of situation MI was built for. Motivational interviewing is a collaborative, person-centered counseling style that helps you work through ambivalence ins

Last reviewed: 04/09/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you are looking for CBT for chronic pain, chances are you are not asking whether the pain is real. You are asking what to do when the pain is real, your world is getting smaller, and more of life is getting organized around symptoms and flares. Good therapy does not argue with your pain. It helps you understand the patterns that can grow around pain so you can protect functioning and make daily life more possible again

Last reviewed: 04/09/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you have been wondering what is neurocounseling, you are probably not looking for a buzzword. You are trying to figure out whether a brain-based therapy approach might make anxiety, depression, or ADHD-related overwhelm feel more understandable and more workable. At its best, that is the point: not to turn therapy into a neuroscience lecture, but to use a clearer brain-and-behavior framework so your treatment feels mor

Last reviewed: 04/09/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly DBT for anxiety can be especially helpful when anxiety does not look like quiet worry alone. For many people, it looks more like getting emotionally flooded, shutting down, snapping during conflict, spiraling after a small trigger, or urgently needing reassurance to feel steady again. Anxiety disorders are common, and while reassurance can bring short-term relief, it does not always build the skills you need to handle int

Last reviewed: 04/05/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly When people search autism demand avoidance, they are usually trying to understand whether a pattern that feels intense, confusing, and sometimes embarrassing “counts” as autism, PDA, anxiety, burnout, or something else. The practical answer is yes: you can be autistic and also have strong demand-avoidant patterns. The more useful question is what makes everyday demands start to feel threatening in the first place, because

Last reviewed: 03/29/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you are trying to decide what to do after a mental health screener, remember what the PROMIS-29 is built to do: it gives you a snapshot of symptoms and daily functioning across several domains, but it does not diagnose you or choose treatment by itself.[1-4][7] The real question is what kind of help fits the part of the profile disrupting life most. In this article, you’ll learn: how to spot the domain that deserves at

Last reviewed: 03/29/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you are trying to track mental health progress, one of the hardest parts is knowing whether change is actually happening or whether this week is just louder than the last one. A general health screener like PROMIS-29 can help because it looks across mood, anxiety, sleep, fatigue, pain, daily function, and social participation instead of asking you to rely on memory alone. Used well, it can become a practical way to not

Last reviewed: 03/29/2026 Reviewed by: Dr. Kiesa Kelly If you are trying to sort out ADHD, anxiety, burnout, or sleep-related focus problems, the phrase screener not diagnosis matters. A broad questionnaire can help you notice distress, but it cannot tell you why those symptoms are happening or which explanation best fits your full history, context, and impairment.[1][2] In this article, you’ll learn: why attention problems, overwhelm, and poor sleep overlap so often what a b