April is National Stress Awareness Month
Here are a few statistics from the American Psychological Association:
•Highly stressed teenagers are twice as likely to smoke, drink and
use illegal drugs.
•Stress contributes to such life-threatening problems as heart attack,
stroke, depression and infection, as well as to chronic aches and pains.
•Three quarters of Americans experience symptoms related to stress
in a given month.
•About half of Americans (48%) feel that their stress has increased over
the past five years.
•About half of Americans (48%) report lying awake at night due to
stress.
We are basically a nation of stressed out individuals.
Now, some stress can be good for us. Just the right amount of stress can
motivate us. Too much can overwhelm us. Most of us learn, for better or worse, to live with a certain degree of stress.
But for some people, stress becomes a way of life.
The acronym PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) is a diagnosis given to those individuals who experience the worst that stress has to offer.
For them, learning to live with stress means giving up a chance at a normal life. PTSD doesn’t always go away on its own, which means that help is necessary.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 7.7 million American adults have PTSD in any given year.
About 19 percent of Vietnam veterans experienced PTSD at some point after the war.
What percentage of our Iraqi and Afghani veterans will experience PTSD?
We can only guess at this point. But given that so many reserve forces have been used from throughout the country, it’s unavoidable that each state will see increases in PTSD as our brave soldiers come home.
We, as a nation, need to be ready to treat them.
Traditional talk therapy, although sometmes beneficial, can actually re-traumatize the patient. The 2009 study published in the journal Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences Medicales du Grand Duche de Luxembourg found that patients treated with a blend of Ericksonian Hypnosis and EMDR techniques showed a marked decrease of PTSD symptoms than those patients treated by more traditional methods.
A number of studies have recently come out showing the help that hypnosis can provide when treating trauma.
The following article, adresses the depth of this problem with our returning soldiers.
Feeling Warehoused in Army Trauma Care Units
(If you are unable to access the link, please paste it in your browser).
May is Mental Health Month
Across the country the National Alliance on Mental Illness will be hosting walks and other events to address the need for an improved mental health treatment program.
For more information on NAMI and the walks this month, visit the NAMI Website.
http://www.nami.org/ (If you are unable to access the link, please paste it in your browser).
Many PBS stations are airing "When Medicine Got It Wrong," a documentary about the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), this week, to coincide with Mother's Day.
There is a big reason why.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many psychiatrists and medical school textbooks perpetuated the myth of the "schizophrenogenic mother," in which a mother's personality was viewed as the source of "bad parenting" and the cause of mental illness, specifically schizophrenia. This is absolutely untrue. Read the entire article here.
Did you know that Schizophrenia and Parkison's Disease are related? Schizophrenic symptoms manifest when there is too much Dopamine in the brain (Dopamine is a neurotransmitting chemical). Symptoms of Parkison's Disease are observable when there is too little Dopamine in the brain. Understanding that both diseases have a neurobiochemical basis is necessary in order to eliminate the stigma attached to the mental illness.
Bipolar Disorder
What is bipolar disorder?
Bipolar disorder, or manic depression, is a medical illness that causes extreme shifts in mood, energy, and functioning. These changes may be subtle or dramatic and typically vary greatly over the course of a person’s life as well as among individuals. Over 10 million people in America have bipolar disorder, and the illness affects men and women equally. Bipolar disorder is a chronic and generally life-long condition with recurring episodes of mania and depression that can last from days to months that often begin in adolescence or early adulthood, and occasionally even in children. Most people generally require some sort of lifelong treatment. While medication is one key element in successful treatment of bipolar disorder, psychotherapy, support, and education about the illness are also essential components of the treatment process.
What are the symptoms of mania?
Mania is the word that describes the activated phase of bipolar disorder. The symptoms of mania may include:
•either an elated, happy mood or an irritable, angry, unpleasant mood
•increased physical and mental activity and energy
•racing thoughts and flight of ideas
•increased talking, more rapid speech than normal
•ambitious, often grandiose plans
•risk taking
•impulsive activity such as spending sprees, sexual indiscretion, and alcohol abuse
•decreased sleep without experiencing fatigue
What are the symptoms of depression?
Depression is the other phase of bipolar disorder. The symptoms of depression may include:
•loss of energy
•prolonged sadness
•decreased activity and energy
•restlessness and irritability
•inability to concentrate or make decisions
•increased feelings of worry and anxiety
•less interest or participation in, and less enjoyment of activities normally enjoyed
•feelings of guilt and hopelessness
•thoughts of suicide
•change in appetite (either eating more or eating less)
•change in sleep patterns (either sleeping more or sleeping less)
What is a "mixed" state?
A mixed state is when symptoms of mania and depression occur at the same time. During a mixed state depressed mood accompanies manic activation.
What is rapid cycling?
Sometimes individuals may experience an increased frequency of episodes. When four or more episodes of illness occur within a 12-month period, the individual is said to have bipolar disorder with rapid cycling. Rapid cycling is more common in women
Build Resilience By Learning To "Forget Yourself"
By Douglas LaBier, Ph.D. May 31 2010
Being a psychologically healthy adult means possessing such qualities as transparency, flexibility and collaboration with diverse people; non-defensiveness, informality, a creative mind-set and nimbleness. These are among those qualities that build and sustain resiliency and overall mental health today. You'll develop a successful and psychologically healthy life to the extent that you build those qualities into your emotional attitudes, mental perspectives and behavior.
In this post I describe an important pathway to cultivating and practicing those qualities: learning to "forget yourself."
It's a paradox. Does it mean not thinking about your own needs? Or not looking out for yourself? Not really. I use "forget yourself" to highlight the capacity to focus on problems, needs, and solutions that lie beyond just your own. That is, take a person who's too absorbed in his or her own self, own conflicts, own disappointments, and the like. Such a person is much less able to handle today's life dilemmas and challenges in positive, solution-oriented ways. That deficiency circles back to create dysfunction, damaged relationships, and career downturns.
Along the way I'll writing about specific ways you can learn to "forget yourself" in your work, your relationships and your role as a global citizen. To start, here are some guidelines that help lay the foundation.
Three Responsibilities:
Think about your responsibilities as a human being living in today's world, and on this planet. Specifically, consider the following three responsibilities. They can serve as helpful guidelines for moving through and beyond the tendency we all share - to focus too much on our own selves.
Responsibility for your own mind-body-spirit
Recognize that it's your job, alone, to continue learning and developing your emotional, mental, creative and physical capacities. Enlarging these capacities helps provide the flexibility and adaptability you need to deal with changes, good or bad. Don't become like the character John Marcher in Henry James' "The Beast In The Jungle," who waited passively, believing that something significant was going to happen...and ended up with a failed life.
Responsibility for those less able
Part of the new criteria for psychological health include this awareness: You grow through your efforts to help and support others, less able than yourself, to find and follow a healthy path in this world. Find someone who needs and would welcome your aid, whether your children or family member. But stretch further, to include a stranger or those within the extended world community who suffer from lack of clean water, from famine, disease or torture. Organizations and individuals who could use your help are a click away on the Internet.
Responsibility for the planet
Reflect on the fact that your actions at home or in your community can help maintain a healthy, sustainable planet for future inhabitants, including your own descendants. Or, they can further jeopardize the environment they will live in. Look at your own actions in your home, your community, and at work. Ask yourself, are you becoming a "good ancestor?"
Some Steps You Can Take:
Loosen the grip of self-interest Use self-awareness to observe - and contain - your self-serving tendencies. It's human to have them; healthy, to keep them at bay. Your emotional well-being and success in today's world is interwoven with how well you engage and connect with something larger than your own needs and desires. Don't neglect them, but when they dominate your field of vision, your heart shuts down. You can't build the tolerance and proactive behavior that you need to keep "evolving." An old saying goes, "If you want to see into your future, look into a mirror." Everything you think, say, and do, steadily molds who you're becoming down the road. What do you see in that mirror?
Practice connection and engagement
The metaphor of Google that I used in the previous post is a good guide for stretching yourself towards actions and attitudes that promote positive engagement. Seek out ways to engage in and demonstrate greater collaboration, non-defensiveness, informality, a creative mindset, flexibility, and nimbleness. Assess yourself along these criteria - in your life as a worker, in your relationships, and as a member of the larger human community. Identify which of those criteria you could strengthen, and begin to do it.
Identify your commonalities with others
Focus on what you have in common with others rather than on the surface differences between you. That builds empathy, especially important for success within an increasingly diverse society. Research shows that you can train your brain to do this. Begin by stepping outside your own mental and emotional perspectives and visualize entering another person's inner world. Seek to understand it, no matter how different from your own. Remember, what's "right" from one perspective may be "wrong" from another. As I wrote in a previous post, empathy is a core ingredient of adult psychological health. It helps expand your mental and emotional perspectives to more fully understand those with whom you have differences - without having to abandon your own views.
Reduce the gaps between your public and private life
Politicians aren't the only people whose public image is sometimes at odds with their private actions: We all have gaps between our motives or values and how we present ourselves in pubic. Aim for transparency in your interactions and transactions. Better it comes from you than from discovering it's been posted on Google or YouTube. More deeply, reflect on unconscious attitudes that might drive your behavior. As the philosopher and mathematician Pascal wrote, "The heart has reasons of its own, which Reason itself is unaware of." Seek help when you suspect you're being pulled by emotions or behavior you don't understand or just can't deal with. But find a mental health practitioner who's tuned in to a more evolved, integrated picture of adult health.
Shift your perspective in difficult life situations
Too often, we personalize negative experiences and react with resentment or self-undermining actions. That's another form of self-centeredness. Healthy adult behavior here means recognizing those tendencies in yourself but not indulging in them. In short, aim towards not taking things personally. Be "indifferent" to those reactions by focusing your energies instead on creating a pro-active, realistic strategy that either improves your situation or changes it. "Indifference" in this sense activates your creative problem-solving capacity for dealing with conflicts at home or at work, as I wrote in a previous post about intimate relationships.
Define your "life footprint."
Imagine you have one or two years left to live. An unpleasant thought, for sure, but it can help in this way: Make a list of what you would want to contribute to the world through your emotional, intellectual and creative powers during your remaining time. This focuses you on thinking about what kind of "footprint" you want to leave on the larger community and the planet. What does that require of you, from this point forward? As an aid, write down how you currently apply your mental and emotional capacities, and what that means long-term. Think of your life as a work of art that you're creating along the way. When you envision reaching the end-point, what will the picture look like that reveals your purpose for having been here? Do you want to make any changes, starting now?
There are people who illustrate some of the above themes as they shift towards healthier lives. For example, a corporate executive who stepped back and identified new business opportunities through sustainable, "green" practices, and initiated them throughout the company. Inspired by Bono's (Product) Red campaign, he created a company project that supported a philanthropic goal. "It was time to bring my personal values into alignment with my business perspectives," he said. Like others who are beginning to think in similar directions, he sees business success as interwoven with serving the common good.
Or the couple who revamped their relationship by reviewing what they wanted their "life footprint" to be. They realized they wanted a greater sense of connection and mutuality between themselves, but also through what they did with their talents and energies. One began a business that had been a longtime dream; the other moved to a company that provided more opportunity for growth and creative expression, but less money. "Sure, there are trade-offs," one of them told me, "but the bottom line is better for our lives. We feel more integrated, more engaged."
