• Supporting Sadness

A young child’s sadness provokes an exquisite kind of pain. Children of any age can have big overwhelming feelings. Knowing that parents will stay as present and loving as the child gets through them instills hope.

Preventing Teen Suicide

• Put Away the Screen & Go to Bed
Between 2007 and 2017 suicide has increased by 56% in 10 to 24-year-olds. Since 2011 youthful suicide attempts have increased 400% –– and that's an undercount. There is a compelling link between “problematic internet and social media use and sleep disturbance among youth,” and “these associations contribute to depressive symptoms in this group.”

Diagnostic Labels

• DSM vs. Biopsychosocial Formulation
The combination of predisposing, precipitating, perpetuating and protective factors will be different for everyone. If a diagnosis is a stamp, a formulation is more like a fingerprint, unique to each individual.

Smartphone Generation Statistics

• What Smartphones Are Doing To A Generation
iGen: a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media.

When Bad Things Happen

• Reassuring Children In Times of National Crisis
In times of community or world-wide crisis, even young children sense their parents are really worried. Parents and teachers can reassure children if they follow these simple steps.

Suicide

• Ask About It
"...people have the misconception that asking a person about suicide will increase the risk, but in reality asking does not increase the risk of suicide, but can save a life.”

Screen Time

• Have Smartphones Harmed a Generation?
Advice for a happy adolescence: put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen.

Hold Your Horses

• Individualized Equine Therapy
HYH is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving quality of life and wellness for people with disabilities. The multidisciplinary team includes board certified physical, occupational, speech and psychotherapy professionals, as well as a team of therapy aides and equine professionals...AND horses.

 

Equating Physical and Mental Illness

• Is It Useful or Accurate
Perhaps rather than equating mental illness with physical illness, we need to recognize that all suffering has some emotional basis, and that relationships are central to all healing.

Redefining Mental Illness

• A New Approach
New approaches recognize that mental illnesses are complex individual responses, not  sharp, clear categories defining those who are sick and those who were well.

Suicide Prevention

• Talking About Surviving

Live Through This is a collection of portraits and stories of suicide attempt survivors, as told by those survivors.

Fledging Your Child

• College Readiness
Are childhood ADHD drugs responsible for the growth in mental health problems at college?

Stranger Danger

• How Fear Affects Development
"...we have ended up scared....of risk. Scared of what some adults do — in secret. Scared of what other adults might think, mistakenly — of us....We are made anxious by our children’s physiological, evolutionary, human desire for physical affection — from us."

Behavior Problems

• Understanding vs. Medicating
To help children with "behavior problems," it is essential to listen to their parents....the behavior is a symptom, perhaps even an adaptive response, to the underlying problem.

Ketamine Relieves Depression

• Relieves Depression by Restoring Brain Connections
It's the best new research lead since the 1970s.

What's Wrong With My Child?

• Wrong Question
Dr. Claudia Gold says don't ask “what is the disorder?” but rather, “what is the experience of this particular child and family and what can we do to move things in a better direction?”

Psychotropic Drug Rx

• American Psychological Assoc. states more research needed
The short- and long-term effects psychotropic medications have on children's physical growth, brain development, behavior, mood and cognitive functioning are unknown.

Regulatory Sensory Processing Disorder

• Children with Developmental and Behavioral Disorders

"...as we learn more about the genetics and neuroscience of mental illness, we will find that the sensory processing issue is primary, and we simply organize the range of symptoms that may result from this problem into categories, in the form of diagnoses such as autism, OCD, anxiety and depression. These may in fact all be regulatory sensory processing disorders."

Children & Divorce

• American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry's Recommendations 
With care and attention children can be helped to deal constructively with the resolution of parental conflict.

Prescribing Anti-depressants in Childhood

• Claudia Gold, MD discusses the price paid: long-term sexual dysfunction.