19
Mar
2016
Written by Ann Bryant / Stars and Stripes
A stray dog brought to Maine from South Carolina will soon head south again as a service dog for a wounded veteran. Service dogs are often used by veterans to manage such mental health issues as PTSD. Rocky arrived at the Franklin County Animal Shelter from Macon County just a few days before One Warrior Won founder Richard Brewer and Vice President of Operations Julie Plummer came up from Portland to meet him and adopted him last Tuesday, said Billie Jo McDonald, animal care technician. “They fell in love with him,” she said. “He was exactly what they wanted.”
18
Mar
2016
Written by Erin Gray / Fox 47 News
Michigan State lacrosse takes on Davenport University in East Lansing this Thursday, St. Patrick’s Day, at 7:00 p.m. As the two teams battle out who will win the game, they will also recognize those who are battling mental illness.
17
Mar
2016
Written by JR Thorpe / Bustle
There are obvious things in life that will drag down your mental health: being in an abusive relationship, for instance, or dealing with the death of a loved one. Beyond that, however, there are factors that you may not realize play a role in keeping mental health on the up, and are letting slide in the belief that they don’t matter. News flash: they do. You need to get enough sleep, get moving, stop smoking, and stop ignoring the seriously stressful parts of your life if you want to avoid heading for a mental health crash.
The mental health disorders I’m addressing here are predominantly the ones that are most affected by environmental factors: the mood disorders, anxiety, depression, and to a lesser extent, bipolar disorder. Others do pop up, though, so it’s not just one size fits all. This isn’t about blame, either: every mental illness is a cocktail of unique factors, and you can’t in all honesty be thought to have “brought it on yourself”. But if you do want to keep your head on the smooth and narrow, there are certain activities to avoid and behaviors to stop, as they’re high-risk when it comes to mental health.
16
Mar
2016
Written by David Kushner / The New Yorker
When I tell people that I had a brother who was kidnapped and murdered, I’m often asked how my parents survived. I was only four when Jon died, so for a long time I had the same question. My family suffered an unfathomable loss. Yet I grew up as free as most kids in the nineteen-seventies: my friends and I biked around town for hours, losing ourselves in the woods, the lakes, the arcades, with no cell phones to find us. When I finally had children of my own, I wondered more than ever how my mom and dad had done it. How had they found the strength not only to survive but to let me go? A few years ago, I began exploring this question while reporting and writing my memoir, “Alligator Candy,” about the murder and its aftermath. During that research, I found a new way to contextualize my family’s experience: a psychological phenomenon called post-traumatic growth. Psychologists have long studied resilience—the ability to bounce back and move on. But post-traumatic growth, which has been documented in hundreds of studies, is different; it’s what happens when trauma changes and deepens life’s meaning. In his recent book on the phenomenon, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” Stephen Joseph, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham, describes victims of trauma experiencing enhanced relationships, greater self-acceptance, and a heightened appreciation of life. “To only look at the dark side and negative side is to miss out on something very important,” Joseph told me recently. Needless to say, no one wants to go through trauma, or suggests it’s a good thing. I’d rather have Jon here with me now—watching Louis C.K., eating a bowl of pho, hearing about his kid’s messy room—than be writing this essay. But, as Rabbi Harold Kushner (no relation) wrote after the loss of his son, “I cannot choose.” The existence of post-traumatic growth suggests that, while the pain never vanishes, something new and powerful is likely to come. As my mother once told my other brother, Andy, and me, “It’s like, after a spring gets pushed all the way down, it rises even higher.”
15
Mar
2016
Written by Samantha Bresnahan / CNN
14
Mar
2016
Written by Andrea Petersen / Wall Street Journal
It is one of the most common and wrenching decisions in mental health: when to stop antidepressant medication.
13
Mar
2016
Written by Beth Galvin / Fox 5
Briana Lawson, 7, of Macon, faces a long road back, after a devastating Christmas Day car accident killed her older sister and left Briana with a severe brain injury.
She spent two months at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, enduring six surgeries. There, therapists are using an unusual approach to help Lawson recover.
12
Mar
2016
Written by Robert J. Szczerba / Forbes
What if you were sick in bed for three days? You’re popping Advil like candy to keep your fever down. You feel like you are going to die. Well-meaning friends offer to swing by the store if you need anything. Your mother brings over chicken soup and tells you to rest up and take it easy. Everyone says “get well soon!” But what if they didn’t? What if, instead, they told you, “Have you tried … you know … just not having the flu? C’mon, shake it off!”
Or imagine you just cut yourself. Or threw out your back. Or had an asthma attack. Or were diagnosed with diabetes. And the response to your malady was “You just need to change your frame of mind, then you’ll feel better.”
These responses seem heartless and insensitive, not to mention socially inept. Yet because mental illness is so misunderstood, this is the type of “helpful advice” that people diagnosed with depression, anxiety disorders and other mental illnesses confront on a daily basis. Talk about adding insult to injury.
11
Mar
2016
Written by Daniel Barron / Scientific American
We treat depression by trying different drugs until we find one that works—a highly imprecise approach to treating the most sophisticated of organs, the brain.
Alexia had been in-and-out of intensive psychiatric therapy for nearly two decades by the time we met. She suffered from bipolar disorder, which meant that she cycled between explosions of boundless energy and black holes of suicidal despair. Despair brought her to our unit.
Her long chart chronicled how previous psychiatrists had emptied the armory: antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, mood stabilizers, group and intensive inpatient therapy, psychotherapy, dialectic and cognitive behavioral therapy. Nothing had a lasting effect
10
Mar
2016
Written by Davie Birkett / Detroit Free Press
Lawrence Jackson considered suicide, sought helps, wants to set an example.
09
Mar
2016
Written by Lisa Scott / The Worry Games
My anxiety disorder first erupted when I was about 25, after my husband had a heart attack at the age of 35. Two days after his heart attack, I was driving home from the hospital and I had my first panic attack and mental health scare.
08
Mar
2016
Written by Helen Kelly / Express
Fern Britton has joined parents to share her experience of maternal mental health problems in a series of short new films produced by Sport Relief.
07
Mar
2016
Written by Nicholas Richard Rees / Out
Olly Alexander opened up to The Guardian‘s Owen Jones, a noted gay columnist and political activist, about his struggle with depression and anxiety. In the article, Alexander shared experiences that likely mirror those of many gay men and LGBT individuals. From childhood bullying to a desire to be anything but gay, he uses these experiences to highlight the inadequate mental health services available.
Although he is currently in private treatment, Alexander wanted to address the stigma attached to mental illness, its discussion, and its availability. With cuts to NHS (National Health Service) under Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, Alexander wanted to lend his voice to an issue that needs attention.
06
Mar
2016
Written by Upworthy / Upworthy
The kids strengthen their reading and empathy and the dogs learn to trust.
05
Mar
2016
Written by Jeanne Safer / New York Times
Of all the patients I have seen in my 40 years as a psychoanalyst, Daniel was the strangest. He was the most inaccessible, inwardly tormented and infuriating man I have ever known, and yet he stayed in therapy with me for over a decade, calling faithfully every week — he insisted that his work schedule precluded coming in person — even though he spent many of those sessions in silence or addressed me as if I were inanimate. He drove me crazy, he haunted me and he moved me, sometimes all in the same session.