The Sinsemillier

06/08/2025

"Cut a stout blackthorn to banish ghosts and goblins..." Or to banish my own internal ableism. For decades I used to power walk all over Boston. No longer. I'm settling into slowing down, but this inner voice keeps telling me that I'm wasting time, to hurry up, there's so much to do.

08/06/2025

New on the blog: "The findings showed that endometriosis put women at a 14% risk of having one additional immunological disease, a 21% increase of at least two, and a 30% increased chance of having at least three, at any point in their lifetime. Overall, there was a 42% risk of developing an autoimmune disease and a 28% risk of developing an autoinflammatory condition. When looking at the link to individual diseases, the risk was between 30% to 80%.
https://thesinsemillier.com/f/endometriosis-and-autoimmune-and-inflammatory-diseases

Over the years, I’ve seen women on social media talk about how they were certain that endometriosis was linked to other chronic conditions. As an advocate who has talked about women’s health for more than ten years, my s...

04/06/2025

Honored to have presented a webinar for PTSD Awareness Month, which premiered today on the Patients Like Me Platform. PLM is an online community of more than 850,000 people living with complex medical conditions. I've been a member for more than 10 years, and became a community leader on the platform recently. It's been wonderful to be part of this supportive space, and I was so happy to be able to share what I've learned about complex trauma (CPTSD) and why trauma-informed care is so important, not just for people living with PTSD or CPTSD, but anyone with a disability or chronic condition who has struggled for years with misdiagnoses, gaslighting, and the byzantine healthcare system in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwtc78FYFS8

June is PTSD Awareness Month, and community leader Lee Frost is here to shed some light on Complex PTSD (CPTSD). In this webinar, she discusses common sympto...

02/06/2025

I've been invited to participate in a research project about endometriosis and boy, do I have Things To Say, since it took nearly 30 years for it to be taken seriously—especially after reading this new paper on the connection between endo and autoimmune diseases:

N/A.

24/04/2025

New blog post over at the CPTSD Foundation! Reading Dr. Jennifer Mullan's Decolonizing Therapy was so inspiring on so many levels. It's a powerful read that addresses so much that underpins the impact the stresses of our society has on mental health. I wish more therapists and healthcare providers would read it!

“A mental health practitioner may work on relational issues with a person, focusing on childhood events, abandonment, abuse, attachments, and family dynamics—which are all relevant and can be important. However, if ancestry, homeland, mother tongue, or a disconnect from any of these aspects of culture and current political climate are not discussed, then the therapy is incomplete… We victim-blame by focusing on personal deficiencies and trauma, rather than structural violence.”

More here: Finding the Ancestors: Learning from Intergenerational Trauma

https://cptsdfoundation.org/2025/04/24/finding-the-ancestors-learning-from-intergenerational-trauma/

21/01/2025

I decided to avoid the news as much as possible today, and wrote about a really cool study on medical cannabis for Complex Dissociative PTSD:

According to Cannakeys, a database that compiles and organizes studies about medical cannabis, there have been around 200 studies on using cannabis to treat PTSD. The quality of the studies vary, but there’s an increasin...

25/12/2024

Sir Poutsalot.

22/12/2024

After giving a series of talks about the neurobiology of Complex PTSD, I've started working on an educational platform about trauma-informed care from the patient perspective. Psyched to get this off the ground soon!
https://ko-fi.com/post/Whats-to-Come-in-the-New-Year-L4L017TEM4

The Shapeshifting Crone published a post on Ko-fi

22/12/2024

After giving a series of talks about the neurobiology of complex PTSD, I've started working on an educational platform about trauma-informed care from the patient perspective. Psych to get this off the ground soon! (More info on the bio!)

04/12/2024

I've been busy working on an educational platform about trauma-informed care, but this headline took me out of my social media hiatus.

24/10/2024

People with long Covid are likely to be left without adequate care, particularly if they also face the barriers of racial, ethnic and gender medical bias. This is yet another example of the already glaring health disparities in the U.S. The result is a health care system that continues to fail and harm the millions of people with long Covid, who must experiment on their own to manage their condition.

Opinion: Some medications for that are already on the market may provide relief. Obtaining them requires a lot of time and money.

16/10/2024

Work has been stressful and the chronic pain has been bad lately, but I managed to take the dog for a walk yesterday. You can feel the first traces of winter in the air, but it's still just warm enough for the last few flowers growing next to my house. Finally have a moment to breathe and rest my mind a bit. Trying to find more moments like this every day.