Mixing modalities

From the Flikr Stream of Emily Hoyer

 

 

 

    A little while ago I started getting trained in the fundamentals "Sand Tray" a particular tool of play therapy. It's very interesting and has more in common with art therapy than it does in what people consider "traditional" therapy where people sit around and talk.
    The set up is pretty simple, you have a container roughly the size of a storage bin filled 1/2-3/4 with sand, and a host of miniatures and a mental health professional. From there you essentially let people do what they want. Some people just push the sand around, others make simple, static scenes. Others make highly elaborate dynamic stories that fill, or even overflow from the container. What usually gets created is the person's head space in some way, shape or form.

    It's a very different way to engage with one's mind. Because it's so mailable, and those hard to articulate thoughts can be represented in the tray without words, a whole new way of working with one's inner life is possible. It's accessible for children and adults, average functioning people, those with disabilities and everyone in between.
    I'm really smitten with it :-) . Everyone's welcome to come and try it out!

Woo! Inflammatory article time!

So Mr. James Oliver at the Guardian has written an article on how current (lack of) genetic evidence for mental illness in populations is strong evidence that much of it is socially constructed, and there for, conservatives are dumb. Ie. Psychological challenges are much more prevalent in people who have a low socio-economic-status as opposed to those who enjoy a high SES regardless of genetic tendencies.

He goes on to talk about how, from a genetic perspective, south east Asia should have the highest rates of depression. While from psych testing it shows to have some of the lowest rates. He goes on to state that this is because they are much more collective society but he doesn’t site any peer-reviewed evidence to support this. Then he goes on to talk about how conservatives are echoing ideas of “Social  Darwinism” in the belief that the genetic sciences would back them up.

While I believe that SES, culture, and environment and quality of learned coping and interaction skills are probably the most important factors in mental health I’m reluctant to take the leap Mr. Oliver did. Correlation / causation are dangerous ideas to conflate, and the ad hominem attacks with it speak to me of major editorializing. Which strikes as a problem when presented in an article that is originally set up to be a fact based one.  

But still… more and more to think about…

It gets better

http://www.itgetsbetterproject.com/

I know I’m a few weeks behind the cutting edge, but I think for everyone who’s not familiar yet with Dan Savages amazing new support idea “It gets better” campaign I thought I’d fill ya in. The main focus is help prevent suicide among teens who identify as part of the LGBTQ community. Many LGBTQ teens commit suicide due to bulling and many other hardships they face as a teen out side the norm. People who identify as LGBTQ, particularly teens, are much much much more likely to use alcohol, other substances, harm themselves and kill themselves.

The youtube channel that he made is filled with videos of adults speaking about their teen years and many of the hardships they faced and that, in fact, life gets better. The bullying ends, they can move to better places, find friends, love and have futures. In hopes that it’ll give strength and solace to LGBTQ youth to make it through. It’s an extremely powerful set of videos and I recommend everyone watch it. Even if you’re not a youth questioning your sexual identity, or knowing that you’re a sexual minority you should watch it, and pass it along to anyone you know who could use some encouragement in life.

http://www.itgetsbetterproject.com/

New MHCA site!

Hi all!
I just completed and set up the new website for the Hudson Valley chapter of the New York Mental Health Counselors Association. Check it out! http://hudsonvalleynymhca.com

Interesting science, misleading reporting.

Science Daily just posted an article reporting on how a group have apparently developed a brain imaging technique to diagnose Autism in adults. This, however, is not really what the article published in "The Journal of Neuroscience" is saying.
I'm really annoyed at the implications that Science Daily is making. To me, their article has a flavor of "Now everyone can get tested!" To me, if you have sensory difficulties, social challenges or other features of Autism-Aspergers that are at a level to be distressing to you, then of course you should seek help. But since there's no real medical cure for ASD (besides one being developed for people with fragile X. And yes I know it's also from science daily, but there have been a few stories about it over the last year or so). So being diagnosed as an adult probably won't do tons for you, other than the relief some people find in having a label for a condition.
Personally I find the real message of the article to be much more interesting. Essentially the researchers found fairly strong evidence that a range of abnormalities in 5 different brain regions seem to be found consistently in people with Autism (sample size was only 20 though, and the control population were people with ADHD) may contribute to autism as a whole. This lends weight to pre-existing ideas that the range in variations in physical neurological abnormalities leads to the cluster of spectrum features that "make up" autism. If anything it helps further research into how these regions working in concert can be distruptive to neuro-typical functioning.

...Just remember, the brain is extremely elastic. People with hydrocephally and people who do not have this condition can have totally different looking brain scans, but have relatively the same functioning and IQ level, it all depends on if/how the brain adapts.

I'm a sucker for a good podcast

I just got around to listening to this weeks episode from “The Moth,” an event where people tell true stories on stage live without notes. Over the year or so I’ve been listening I’ve heard stories about people who think they were being haunted, doctors trying to save lives, famous actresses saying how they went psycho on ex-boyfriends. This weeks was particularly striking to me as it focused on a man talking about a Cambodian woman’s experiences during and after the Khmer Rouge. After surviving the atrocities she played a major role in helping a large number of women with PTSD who had seemingly entered a vegetative depression once they reached the relative safety of refugee camps. She spoke about a three-part method for this. Helping people speak about their experiences and letting them learn to “forget” so they could move on, having them do life skills so that they could feel some accomplishment, purpose and maintain themselves more. Lastly, she taught them to do manicures and pedicures. She did this she says so they could have physical contact with others again, and learn to trust and build a community. It’s very interesting to me how universal particular types of responses are to particular types of events, and how often the “treatments” are really focused on community building, rapport building, and allowing people the space to derive meaning from their lives. It seems like I’d be put of the job pretty quickly with some social reforms :-)

Bullies and their victims

Ohh, I love Science daily. It’s like reader’s digest for PsycInfo (I wish I still had access to that, anyone who hooks me up will get a plate of cookies!) …. Anyway… I really like the article they just covered on the correlations between skill sets and bully/victim behavior. Dr. Clayton Cook of LSU did a meta-study on 153 different studies that examined which traits, or lack there of, went a long being a bully or a victim with interesting results. It seems that the main commonalities are that both groups have poor social-problem resolution skills, perform poorly in school, experience social isolation, have negative views of themselves and others, and possibly have challenging homes lives.


A lot of this may fall into a “chicken or the egg” question, but it I think it highlights very important information in how to handle it. Like most American “corrections” policy, a lot of anti-bullying policy focuses on chastisement and isolation of the perpetrator. Nietzsche would probably argue that this mostly does little more than let the victims feel a little schadenfreude (I think spreading activation theory clicked my brain over into German mode…). Instead of suspending a person, which would further isolate them and probably cause more challenges for them in school, wouldn’t it make more sense to view behaviors on both ends as an expression of need? Working on academic and social skill building, hopefully early on, would probably do much for everyone involved. Maybe I’ve read too much Buddhism, but it really does seem that all human cruelty springs from a lacking or pain in one form or another. Solving that seems to me to be the best way to end the cruelties.