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Archive for the ‘Community Support’ Category

Create a sense of belonging. Feeling connected and welcomed is essential to children’s positive adjustment, self-identification, and sense of trust in others and themselves. Building strong, positive relationships among students, school staff, and parents is important to promoting mental wellness.

Promote resilience. Adversity is a natural part of life and being resilient is important to overcoming challenges and good mental health. Connectedness, competency, helping others, and successfully facing difficult situations can foster resilience.

Develop competencies. Children need to know that they can overcome challenges and accomplish goals through their actions. Achieving academic success and developing individual talents and interests helps children feel competent and more able to deal with stress positively. Social competency is also important. Having friends and staying connected to friends and loved ones can enhance mental wellness.

Ensure a positive, safe school environment. Feeling safe is critical to students’ learning and mental health. Promote positive behaviors such as respect, responsibility, and kindness. Prevent negative behaviors such as bullying and harassment. Provide easily understood rules of conduct and fair discipline practices and ensure an adult presence in common areas, such as hallways, cafeterias, locker rooms, and playgrounds. Teach children to work together to stand up to a bully, encourage them to reach out to lonely or excluded peers, celebrate acts of kindness, and reinforce the availability of adult support.

Teach and reinforce positive behaviors and decision making. Provide consistent expectations and support. Teaching children social skills, problem solving, and conflict resolution supports good mental health. “Catch” them being successful. Positive feedback validates and reinforces behaviors or accomplishments that are valued by others.

Encourage helping others. Children need to know that they can make a difference. Pro-social behaviors build self-esteem, foster connectedness, reinforce personal responsibility, and present opportunities for positive recognition. Helping others and getting involved in reinforces being part of the community.

Encourage good physical health. Good physical health supports good mental health. Healthy eating habits, regular exercise and adequate sleep protect kids against the stress of tough situations. Regular exercise also decreases negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, and depression.

Educate staff, parents and students on symptoms of and help for mental health problems. Information helps break down the stigma surrounding mental health and enables adults and students recognize when to seek help. School mental health professionals can provide useful information on symptoms of problems like depression or suicide risk. These can include a change in habits, withdrawal, decreased social and academic functioning, erratic or changed behavior, and increased physical complaints.

Ensure access to school-based mental health supports. School psychologists, counselors, and social workers can provide a continuum of mental health services for students ranging from universal mental wellness promotion and behavior supports to staff and parent training, identification and assessment, early interventions, individual and group counseling, crisis intervention, and referral for community services.

Provide a continuum of mental health services. School mental health services are part of a continuum of mental health care for children and youth. Build relationships with community mental health resources. Be able to provide names and numbers to parents.

Establish a crisis response team. Being prepared to respond to a crisis is important to safeguarding students’ physical and mental well-being. School crisis teams should include relevant administrators, security personnel and mental health professionals who collaborate with community resources. In addition to safety, the team provides mental health prevention, intervention, and postvention services.

by the National Association of School Psychologists

Playing outside is good for the body and mind. Just ask Camille Craig-Klein of Plainfield.

Nothing tames a houseful of active boys better than outdoor activity, said the mother of four boys. She added that the fresh air, exercise and contact with nature keeps them healthier, trimmer and happier.

“When they move around more, they don’t get as sick,” Craig-Klein said of her boys, ages 3, 5, 10 and 11. “One has autism and a little bit of a problem with his weight, but since we’ve been swimming three or four days a week, he’s lost some weight. The boys fight less, too, when they’re not cooped up. They actually have fun together.”

Scientific proof

While Craig-Klein’s conclusions are based on what she’s observed in her family, there is scientific evidence to back up what she says.

Spending summertime outdoors provides immunity to disease, upbeat moods, and ease of socializing, said Dr. David Rakel, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin and medical director of the UW Health Integrative Medicine program.

That’s because playing outside frees neuropeptides (proteins released in the brain following positive perceptions), which create the pleasant feelings.

Conversely, excessive amounts of time indoors, and too much soap and hand sanitizer may actually stunt full development of the immune system.

“There’s some promising research that shows kids who grow up playing in the dirt and on farms actually have less asthma and allergic rashes of the skin,” Rakel said. “In essence, kids who are exposed to bacteria and elements in nature train their immune systems to be better balanced, so, in the long run, they may remain healthier.”

via Fun in sun has health benefits for kids :: Herald News :: Lifestyles.

As the number of children believed to be autistic has skyrocketed in Texas and worldwide, much of the public debate has focused on the reasons for the rapid increase. But after a decade in which the state has seen a fourfold spike in diagnoses of the condition — to nearly 30,000 — the more pressing questions for policymakers are how to best educate afflicted students and how to pay for it.

During the last legislative session, State Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, introduced legislation to expand the availability of special education training to Texas teachers, influenced, in part, by the growing number of students with autism. The bill included a small stipend for participation to encourage additional training, but after passing unanimously in the Senate, it died in the House.

Now some lawmakers are exploring the idea of building charter schools for special ed students and integrating them into existing campuses. They’re looking, in particular, at a New York City charter school for autistic children that is located inside a public school. “I absolutely believe that a charter school system is viable for Texas,” says state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano. Another “ideal option,” Shapiro says, is putting autism charter schools on state university campuses, where they could draw on university money, staff and expertise.

via Texas lawmakers face challenges of autistic children’s education | kens5.com | San Antonio News, Weather, Sports, Traffic, Entertainment, Video and Photos.

Dr. Charles Raison, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University, offers thoughts today on new research on diagnosing bipolar disorder in children. Every Tuesday, he answers viewer questions on mental health on CNNHealth.com.

I get a lot of reader questions on bipolar disorder, particularly bipolar in children. In fact in May we had quite an interesting conversation about whether bipolar disorder can really be diagnosed in young children and the stress and guilt that parents feel in these situations.

A new study touches upon this very issue:  How reliably bipolar disorder can be diagnosed in young people before the development of clear-cut disease symptoms (for example a full-blown mania).

Here is the problem: Looking back into the childhoods of people with bipolar disorder, one typically finds all sorts of early warning signs of future trouble, such as mood swings, depression, attention deficit type symptoms, aggression, etc. On the other hand, if we rounds up children or adolescents with these symptoms and follow them into adulthood, only a minority will go on to develop bipolar disorder. It’s a case of hindsight being 20-20, but of course from a medical point of view we’d like some way of identifying at-risk individuals ahead of time with enough accuracy to justify early interventions.

Researchers from Australia have just published findings directly relevant to this question in The Journal of Affective Disorders. They reported that by applying a set of criteria based on family history, age and present symptoms they were able to identify young people who were 100 times more likely than those without these risk factors to develop a full mania over the next year.

This sounds very promising until one looks a little closer at the article. It turns out that the young people identified as being at risk were already fairly close to meeting criteria for bipolar disorder. And even in this extremely high risk group, only 22 percent went on to develop clear-cut bipolar disorder. This means that even in the highest risk group imaginable, three-quarters did not progress to full disease, at least over close to a year’s follow-up.

So, I would suggest that this really highlights both the importance of accurate diagnoses on the one hand, and the risks of “jumping the gun” on the other and applying labels prematurely. What we can say for sure is that all children and adolescents with behavioral/emotional difficulties should be helped as quickly and as fully as possible, because these types of problems are so horrible in the present that they do not require prognosticating about the future to justify their treatment.

It’s not often that Cheryl Ziegler gets to spend a relaxing night at home. Between driving her daughters to softball practice or taking in one of her son’s baseball games, Ziegler’s schedule is booked.The proof is in her calendar. The Lennox mom of three, 16-year-old Mikayla and 11-year-olds Alison and Jacob, has each event highlighted and color-coded. “That’s how I know who needs to be where and when.”

There have been times, Ziegler says, “when I was not home during an evening for over two weeks at a time.”

That kind of busy life is all too common for American families, many experts say. And with school starting soon and fall activities beginning, for many families, it will only get worse.

But what do you do when you want to make sure your child has the activities and skills to get ahead? For some parents, the answer is to slow down and focus on more unstructured family time, rather than racing from one activity to the next.

It’s easy to get stressed, Ziegler says.

Her kids are only doing what they love – they’re not just getting involved in activities just for the sake of getting involved.

Practically from the moment parents give birth, they’re offered a number of structured activities for themselves and their kids. From their first new baby group to their kid’s high school theater habit, they are urged to spend the next 18 years devoting every waking moment to enrichment activities – and with the school year gearing up again in the next month, parents will be hearing more about extra-curricular classes, activities and sports their kids can join.

Many of these activities have a lot to offer. But some take a lot of time, spurring some families to say “enough already” and slow down.

Societal change

Like the slow food movement, whose proponents suggest taking the time to savor rather than gulp and preserve traditional standards of excellence with ingredients and cuisines, the slow family movement is about focusing on changing the way society thinks about family living.

It’s the idea that more isn’t always better, says Carrie Contey, a nationally recognized parenting coach and co-founder of the movement. “It is about allowing family life to unfold in a way that is joyfully and consciously connected,” she says. “This means slowing it down, finding comfort in the home, and creating the space to see and honor the family as an entity, while simultaneously keeping sight of each member as a unique and valuable individual.”

via Busy families struggle to find time | argusleader.com | Argus Leader.

Previous examination from the University of Toronto made the revelation that if an adult faces physical abuse in his childhood, it tends to augment the instances of him getting affected with osteoarthritis.

However, specialists now emphasize that abuse and ignorance during childhood are apparently associated with increased mood, anxiety and substance use amongst young adults.

Previous inquiries of child abuse and later mental health have relied on reports of past abuse.

However, these findings are not dependable as past ill-treatment is said to have not been reported and recollections are vulnerable to manipulations. Furthermore, reports may be unbalanced with the passing time.

Authors divulge that if these individuals are not compared with the other group, the scale of associations went up high, with child protection agency discussing about a 10-fold higher odds of 12-month PTSD, jointly with augmented odds of other anxiety disorders, mood disorders and drug use disorders.

Specialists analyzed the statistics that was accumulated from a nationally representative society study on mental disorders amongst young adults aged between 16 and 27.

The study enlisted 2,144 young adults, where 221 of them had history of child abuse as depicted by child protection agency account.

They recognized that 15% of the volunteers, without a child protection agency record, reported of abuse.

via Study: Physical Abuse in Childhood Attributed to Mental Disorders in Adulthood | TopNews United States.

Mental Health: Jamie de Volder, alongside mother, shares her experience battling an eating disorder.

At 5’9” and weighing a mere 85 pounds, Jamie de Volder was ready to enter a medical system that didn’t know what to do with her.

At age 16, de Volder’s future appeared bright. She was a top student and a skilled and ambitious athlete. But by the end of Grade 9, living up to the expectations of an honours student and basketball team captain became a labour of self-destruction.

“I can’t say why things took a turn for the worst. Maybe it was due to my quest to be in top shape and eat healthier. Maybe it was my low self-esteem. But whatever it was, anorexia eventually got a hold of me,” explained de Volder when she bravely took the podium as a guest speaker for the June 24 Canadian Mental Health Shuswap/Revelstoke Branch annual general meeting.

Come Grade 10, de Volder’s physical state hindered her performance during tryouts for the summer games basketball team and school team captain. She says it began to feel as though there were weights attached to her legs. She was freezing cold and tired all the time.

“I remember my sister would drive past me when I was out walking but I refused because I needed the exercise to burn off the food I had to eat. I turned from being a kind, honest person to a lying, manipulative cow for lack of a better word.”

De Volder’s denial came to an end on the day of her awards ceremony when, while getting changed, her mother Cindy Dobbe broke down in tears at the sight of her daughter’s body. She was admitted to Children’s Hospital the next day and was told if she waited longer she would have to have been wheeled in. Five months in hospital helped with de Volder’s physical recovery, but over the next year she relapsed twice and when she wanted it, de Volder found she could not get the help she needed.

“There was always a wait list with just too many people on it,” said de Volder. “It meant more to me then just that. It reinforced to me that I was worthless and even the hospital didn’t want me.”

Two years of going back and forth between a regular hospital and Children’s Hospital with little or no progress proved too much for Dobbe, who became frustrated with the B.C. medical system and its lack of resources for treating people with eating disorders.

“I was being told, ‘she’s sick, she needs to be in hospital.’ I’d say, ‘well then, put her in.’ And they’d say, ‘there’s no bed, there’s no room for her,’” explained Dobbe, who shared the podium with her daughter at the AGM.

The next move for Dobbe was to take a mortgage out on the family home in order to send de Volder for specialized treatment in Arizona. While there, Dobbe made the acquaintance of other parents and the support group the developed later evolved into The Looking Glass Foundation.

“We are parents, friends and individuals who know the fear of living with a child suffering from an eating disorder,” states the Foundation on its website. “We believe that the treatment available in Canada is not enough and have joined together to create an intensive treatment center for adolescents.”

The Foundation will soon open the Woodstone Treatment Facility. Located on nine acres on Galiano Island, the facility is the nation’s first treatment centre for children suffering with eating disorders.

“I do believe people do suffer with the illness and they don’t choose this one,” said Dobbe. “We started Looking Glass because treatment options available to eating disorder patients in B.C. were, and still are limited. In fact, many still leave the country, many are left untreated, and many just receive no care at all.”

Though de Volder made huge strides in overcoming her eating disorder, she says she survives day by day. She has married and is now a registered nurse, working in the adolescent psychiatry with the B.C. Children’s Hospital. And though anorexia took away her dreams of youth, she considers herself lucky. She recalls one friend suffering with bulimia who sewed her lips shut, and another who choked on a toothbrush while trying to make herself purge. De Volder credits her parents for their unwavering support, despite the “extreme stress and hardships” she put them through.

Dobbe told the audience the Looking Glass Foundation would be able to provide help for the formation of a local support groups, in addition to online support groups provided through their website (http://lookingglass.umeetsupport.com/register/).

Counseling is also available through the Salmon Arm Health Unit, and eating disorder toolkits are available through the local Canadian Mental Health Branch at 433 Hudson Avenue.

via BCLocalNews.com – From illness to advocacy.

The ever-growing issue of cyberbullying has hit children at all age levels. Bullying is not designated for the classroom, lunchroom or playground anymore. It reaches into the living room, bedroom and kitchen of bullied children.

Severe cases of cyberbullying have occurred in school districts across Long Island, some of which have resulted in death-threats, fights and suicide.

“We’ve heard terrible stories from kids who were bullied online,” one Long Island school administrator said. “Parents have heard their children contemplate suicide and horrible, horrible things when it comes to being cyberbullied, but got them help. It’s sad and [New York] state should do something about it.”

According to Dr. Victor Fonari, director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at North Shore University Hospital, the definition of bullying over the last ten years has changed drastically.Fonari was a professor at the NYU School of Medicine and has been appointed to the United States Department’s National Crisis Response Team. He will be a professor of psychiatry at the Hofstra University School of Medicine in July 2011.

Fonari said bullying used to be confined to aggressive behavior of individuals toward others such as verbal threats, bodily injury, sexual harassment and emotional and psychological disruption.

However, now bullying has reached into the “information superhighway” and attacks people and children’s psyche more than ever. The harm that comes to a young child’s mind can shape how they develop as an individual.

via Cyberbullying Workshop Highlights Prevalent Issues.

State budget planners have a daunting task. How do they save tax dollars without throwing to the wolves society’s most vulnerable?

One strategy is to invest in more programs like community mental health, which not only pays for itself and returns to the taxpayer $1 billion each year in savings, but also each year improves the quality of life for 500,000 New Jersey residents.

Thirty years ago, the state began investing in community mental health’s statewide network of community prevention and treatment programs. These programs replaced high-cost inpatient care as the treatment of choice for those with disabling mental health conditions.

By investing in community mental health programs, the state has reduced the number of public psychiatric beds from 15,000 in 1970 to roughly 2,000 in 2010. Thanks to this 87 percent reduction, the taxpayer avoided a $2 billion price tag in FY 2010 for public psychiatric beds. Instead, investing in community mental health has allowed the state to finance the entire community treatment system and remaining public psychiatric beds at a combined cost of $1 billion.

In FY 2010 alone, this provided the taxpayer a net savings of $1 billion. Now, multiply that by 20 or 30 years and we get a sense of how much has been saved over the past few decades. So, what will be the impact of the proposed cutbacks in the FY 2011 budget?

Whenever there are community mental health cutbacks, there is always the risk of increased high-cost emergency care, hospitalizations, community incidents, incarcerations, etc. Any cutback to these services is always a high-cost gamble for short-term budget savings.

Instead of cutbacks, the state should focus on applying community mental health’s cost-saving strategy to other problems. For example, we should focus on reducing the high cost of homelessness by implementing community mental health’s Housing First model throughout New Jersey, as numerous other cities and states have done.

Housing First is a triumph of common sense. It looks first to correct the homeless person’s housing problem and then address the other problems that have contributed to homelessness. Housing First programs provide housing, treatment and 24/7 support to ensure that the formerly chronically homeless stay healthy enough to be good tenants and good neighbors.

Housing First studies have shown that by providing an apartment and community treatment to the chronically homeless with mental illness, we can reduce their use of high-cost services (e.g., emergency room visits, hospitalizations, incarcerations, etc), and thereby reduce the taxpayer’s burden.

Greater Trenton Behavioral HealthCare operates the state’s first Housing First program. A consortium of government agencies, the Greater Mercer United Way and the Mercer Alliance to End Homelessness jointly funds this pilot project. Researchers from Tufts University provide program evaluation.

via Community mental health saves lives and tax dollars – NJ.com.

Tuesday, June 08th, 2010, by Emily Tseng

In the coming months, state mental health officials expect an increase in victims seeking services related to last month’s flooding.

Up to this point, they say flood victims have been too busy meeting basic needs in the immediate aftermath to pay attention to their mental health.

Debra Dillon with the Southeast Mental Health Center says that as the months go on, people will begin to feel the effects of what they’ve been through.

“They’re still having anxiety, depression, flashbacks to some of the things they’ve been through, children having nightmares about the situations, and that’s the time that they’ll start calling and wanting to come in and get into counseling and get some help in dealing with some of that.”

The state recently received a short-term grant for $380,000 to provide sixty days of educational programs; however, officials plan to apply for a long-term grant from the federal government to continue crisis counseling services throughout the year.

FEMA’s $380,000 grant was awarded to the Tennessee Recovery Project, a service whose workers provide counseling to survivors and referrals to mental health professionals, but do not diagnose or keep case files themselves. The project has established a referral hotline: 1-800-809-9957.

via Flood Victims Likely to Have Long-term Mental Health Needs – Nashville Public Radio.