But after three weeks my blood sugar levels evened out and after five, my (bad) cholesterol levels had dropped 72 points! My cholesterol ratio also stabilized and my blood pressure plummeted to 120 over 80—where it’s been ever since. Oh, did I mention? I lost over 100 pounds in just five months (hey, I’m a big guy—a former athlete). And except for the first couple of weeks, I was never irritable or hungry.

Your Therapy Soup blogger and Steven Diamond discuss everything from sleeping in “squats” to parenting to patient advocacy in this podcast on mental illness and addiction.

No matter what methods or techniques your therapist uses there are universal recommendations for the process of therapy.

You don’t have to have a heart condition to use this enjoyable breathing and visualization technique though as Dr. Kennedy says, it puts the heart in an “idling” mode which gives it a rest. We really feel it happening almost immediately.

Despite the frustrations and limitations of treatment, the reality is that a person with a mental illness such as schizophrenia is far better off today than at any point in history—the knowledge and the capacity we have to treat people is greater than it ever was.