Kristi SmithLPC

Depression often causes people to feel sad, empty, or hopeless, and can cause a lack of interest in life. It can also affect a person's thinking patterns and physical health.

Grief is a reaction to an emotionally significant loss and often comes with symptoms of depression or anxiety. These symptoms can remain intense and last for a long time after a loss, making it difficult to move forward with a healthy lifestyle.

Regular involvement with a substance or activity in a compulsive, hard to control way that often has harmful consequences. Often refers to substance use, but can include compulsive behaviors such as sex, gambling, or shopping.

Personality disorders entail a maladaptive way of behaving, feeling, and thinking that deviate from societal and cultural norms. They may lead to personal distress, interpersonal issues, harmful behaviors, and legal issues. Personality disorders include paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. They are treatable but not curable.

Coping skills are tools and techniques one can learn, practice, and use to handle difficult emotions, decrease stress, and establish or maintain a sense of internal order.

Anxiety can mean nervousness, worry, or self-doubt. Anxiety disorder is a mental health disorder that entails excessive, repeated bouts of worry, anxiety, and/or fear.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by persistent instability in relationships, extreme emotional reactions, and chronic fear of abandonment. People with this may also tend to be moody, experiencing a lot of high highs and low lows.

Aging brings on unique challenges like cognitive issues, dementia, Alzheimers, facing one’s own mortality, retirement, physical health concerns, grieving and loss, overcoming past regret, spirituality/religion, finances, one’s legacy, and life meaning.

It's normal to experience anger at times, but for some, it becomes so frequent, intense, or difficult to control that it negatively affects their life. Anger management is a structured therapeutic approach toward reducing one’s anger to a point where more appropriate coping and/or conflict management skills are used. Beliefs and thoughts leading toward anger outbursts are explored while healthy coping and interpersonal skills are put into practice.

Identified as self-starvation with strict eating behaviors included food refusal and an irrational fear of gaining weight that doesn’t subside with ongoing weight loss. Common symptoms include poor self-image, self-esteem, nutrition, and overall health.