Pride and Joy: A Guide to Understanding Your Child's Emotions and Solving Family Problems

In his recently published book Pride & Joy, child psychologist Kenneth Barish elaborates on a particular perspective to illustrate the path towards building a child's sense of optimism and emotional resilience.

 

Readers are reminded to focus on their child's efforts and what enabled them to achieve their goal. This in turn helps to promote the child's ability to persevere at a task rather than merely focusing on their accomplishments.

 

Providing real-life examples of various issues that parents face with their children, he offers the reader an opportunity to become more attuned to their child's emotional health.

 

Rather than merely provide a how-to book on parenting, he helps parents gain a deeper understanding of both their child and of themselves in relation to their child.

 

Pride & Joy is a very readable book for the intelligent parent and all those who interact with children.

 

To buy the book click here: Pride and Joy: A Guide to Understanding Your Child's Emotions and Solving Family Problems

Announcing a new book entitled: FIERCE JOY a memoir

          

   

I would like to recommend a memoir to all those who are dealing with a serious and debilitating health or life challenge or who knows someone who is facing this type of situation.

                        

Written by author Ellen Schecter, a courageous woman and gifted writer, this book describes her personal journey battling an illness that challenged her in every way.

              

Most impressive and inspirational, is how she builds and maintains her spirit, sense of humor and interpersonal ties while her body belies her emotional strength and courage.

     

submitted by Robin Halpern, LCSW, DCSW

The Tissue Issue

Clients' and patients' personal stories are road maps that help psychotherapists and clients navigate unexplored areas in the clients' lives. But what isn't said can be just as important as what's spoken. There is a long tradition in treatment modalities such as play therapy, art therapy and dance therapy of interpreting non-verbal cues. Though I was never a student of those schools, session after session, I started to see that behavior in treatment spoke volumes. I noticed that clients' actions could reveal unconscious beliefs about themselves and others. This essay explores how clients use tissues and what that might tell us that words alone cannot. 

Click here to read the article...

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Komen’s Betrayal of Women’s Health, and their Voice

"A clinical psychologist reflects on the Komen foundation's decision to cut, and then refund, breast screening for poor women at Planned Parenthood. Women all over the U.S. have made clear that our voices and our efforts to fight breast cancer should not, and cannot, be co-opted for political gains, especially not at the cost of women's health." 

to read the article click here...

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Perinatal and Postpartum Mood Disorders

Statistics on the prevalence of perinatal mood disorders suggest that up to 20% of women experience diagnosable pregnancy related mood disorders. This increasing awareness has also resulted in legislative and healthcare initiatives to screen, assess, and treat such disorders. But a major barrier to successful implementation of such programs is the lack of available resources to train healthcare professionals in this specialty.
 
This book offers a major resource for healthcare professionals, mental health professionals, and medical, nursing, psychology, and social work students who will be confronting this problem in their practices. The contributions, by renowned experts, fill a glaring gap in the knowledge professionals need in order to successfully manage maternal mental health.

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Yoga and the Mind/Body Connection

NEW YORK ABLE NEWSPAPER-FEBRUARY 2012: FOCUS ON WOMEN'S HEALTH
Coordinated by the Initiative with Women with Disabilities

Over the past three decades, yoga has swept the nation with a health care reform of its own.

Yoga has become a multibillion dollar industry, encompassing the weight loss industry, clothing industry,
mats and accessories and complete yoga retreats at international luxury destinations.

So how does a fitness trend so ingrained in popular culture and commerce have anything to do with Social Work?

Organizations like the Yoga Research and Education Center and the International Association of Yoga Therapists have contributed considerable evidence showing benefits to people with physical disabilities, mood disorders and severe mental illness. Unfortunately these groups often have limited or no access to the mainstream practice of yoga.

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OCD Support and Education Group

Location-Upper East Side.

Time- The group meets from 6-7:30 on the first Thursday of every month.

Description-This group has a few different components and serves as a supplement to individual treatment for OCD.

The first component is that of a support group. 

-Support: Many times the symptoms of OCD, the specific obsessive thoughts and/or the compulsive behaviors, bring about feelings of shame and isolation.  This group addresses these feelings by providing members with a safe accepting environment in which to meet with others who have similar experiences. There will be an emphasis on those common experiences and the challenges of treatment.

The second component is education.

-Education- Participants will learn more about OCD and will learn strategies that may be helpful to cope with symptoms. Guidance will be given around creating personalized goals that can be integrated into their current treatment regimens.

 Participants-All individuals with a diagnosis of OCD are welcome. Participants include those experiencing an episode triggered by pregnancy, postpartum, or other life events and those with long standing OCD.

Fee-The initial phone consultation is free and group sessions are $75.

Contact Information-Please contact Dr. Marika Kyrimis at or   if you would like more information about the group.

The Relational Void: Gains and Losses

We are delighted to announce that the newly published book Loneliness and Longing: Conscious and Unconscious Aspects [Paperback] contains a paper written by Joan Lavender, Psy.D. on The Relational Void: Gains and Losses.

This is a solid collection of contemporary psychoanalysts writing both theoretically and personally about the topic. Routledge is the publisher.

Brent Willock (Editor), Lori C. Bohm (Editor), Rebecca Coleman Curtis (Editor)

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Complicated Grief and Deficits in Emotional Expressive Flexibility

Sumati Gupta and George A. Bonanno
Columbia University
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
2011, Vol. 120, No. 3, 635–643

There is growing evidence that deficits in emotion regulation may be at the heart of maladaptive reactions after bereavement. Expressive flexibility, or the ability to flexibly enhance or suppress emotional expression, appears to be especially important for adjustment in the aftermath of highly aversive events (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004). In this study, we compared expressive flexibility in a sample of bereaved adults who lost their spouse 1.5–3 years earlier and a comparable sample of married adults. Approximately half of the bereaved adults had Complicated Grief (CG) and half were asymptomatic. Using a within-subjects design, we asked all participants to either enhance or suppress their expressions of emotion or to behave normally while viewing evocative pictures at a computer screen. Observer ratings of expressiveness made blind to condition showed no group differences in overall emotion. However, bereaved adults suffering from CG exhibited deficits in expressive flexibility. Specifically, the CG group was less able to enhance and less able to suppress emotional expression relative to asymptomatic bereaved and married adults.

to read the article: click here

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Noncardiac chest pain and psychopathology in children and adolescents

Joshua D. Lipsitza,T, Carrie Masiab, Howard Apfela, Zvi Maransa, Merav Gura,
Heather Denta, Abby J. Fyer

Abstract
Objective: We sought to examine the prevalence of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents with complaints of noncardiac chest pain (NCCP). Method: We assessed 27 youngsters (ages 8–17 years) referred to a pediatric cardiology practice with complaints of NCCP. Each child and a parent were interviewed using the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for Children.

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