Moderator ★, Author at WiseSOVA

Resilience: A Skill that Can Be Learned (Part 1)

Resilience (or flexibility and toughness) is a skill that can be used to bounce back from stressful situations and to respond to life’s challenges. The United States Army Reserve developed a Resilience Training Program based on research about how to improve resilience. Designed at the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, the program is called Master Resilience Training Skills. Army service members are required to dedicate 24 hours to studying this curriculum, which can benefit anyone—including our children.

Resilency

Check out this video about building up your resilience against shame.

Continue reading Resilience: A Skill that Can Be Learned (Part 1)

Review: Jenny Lawson, Must-Read Mental Health Author

We received this review written from a young SOVA blogging ambassador. It’s about the mental-health writing of New York Times bestselling author Jenny Lawson, also famously known as “The Bloggess.” Lawson has been writing about her experiences for almost 10 years, and her frankness, irreverence, and humor have gained her a large following. Check her out!

Continue reading Review: Jenny Lawson, Must-Read Mental Health Author

App review: Shinetext.com!

For kids who have experienced depression or anxiety, it’s common to want an extra boost to start their days. It’s easy to lie in bed and keep pressing snooze, making themselves late to eat breakfast or catch the bus. They may want to check out a new game-changing app called Shinetext.com that can be programmed to deliver daily motivational texts to help them start the day in a sunnier mood!

Shinetext’s messages include evidence-based tips for improving attitudes toward daily life. Recent messages offered suggestions like these:

How to stop asking, “Is it my fault?”
Loving reminders for when it’s time to stand up for yourself
Five ways to put self-love into action
How to make peace with fear of change

The app lets the user set the texts to arrive for any preferred time of day. But since most teens start their mornings by looking at their phones before anything else, how awesome to start the day with positive, actionable messages like these.

According to the app developers,

93 percent of people who have used Shine texts say that they are more confident and have seen a noticeable improvement in their daily happiness.

To try it out, click the Shinetext site and start receiving inspirational texts today!

For children—or adults—who have experienced depression, sometimes the first hurdle of the day is just getting out of bed. Has your child experienced this difficulty? Does your child have a positive morning or nightly practice? Let us know in the comments!

Can we always talk openly?

One of the most persistent difficulties about fostering our children’s mental health is how we talk about it to our kids and among other adults. We recently received this question:

Can we always talk openly about mental health difficulties?

This question is so important, and it’s one that many others have also tried to address. TED.com has an article about how should we talk about mental health. The folks at TED.com asked several mental health experts about how we should go about discussing mental health, and these were their answers:

Continue reading Can we always talk openly?

Knowing the time to seek help

We have been receiving many questions from people negotiating mental health difficulties. Here is another:

“How do we know it when we see it or feel it and what do we do?”

This is an important question because often parents of children with mental health difficulties feel they should wait to seek treatment until their kids can’t handle things on their own anymore. This is often the desire of the children, too.

But how will I know when I should seek help for my child?

First, it’s always okay to seek help—even if you’re not sure whether your child is experiencing a specific mental health problem. It is a good exercise for children to be taught that they can ask for help—for any problem, including a mental health difficulty. Almost everyone can benefit from receiving professional help at some point in their lives.

However, it might be time to reach out to someone when your child is having trouble managing, he or she is overwhelmed, or when their thoughts and feelings are limiting their daily functioning. There are a wide range of signs to look for, and if your child is feeling any or a combination of the following things, it might time to talk to a professional:

Continue reading Knowing the time to seek help

Asking for help: Who to ask first?

We recently received a question about who to go to for help about mental health when your child is feeling like he or she may want to speak to someone. More specifically, the question asks,

Who to go to for help first?

Asking for help is one of the most important acts we can teach our children. Seeking help for a mental health difficulty (or any difficulty) is a really important first step towards feeling better and staying well. Mental health conditions are real, common and treatable. However, it does not always seem like that, especially because of the stigma attached to mental health conditions. Therefore, while many people live with symptoms and mental health conditions, often it can be hard to know how to start looking for help, or who and where to turn to.

Who to turn to can depend on many factors, but in general, there are often many people in our children’s lives who can offer help. These people include:

Teachers
School counselors, or university counseling services
Parents
Other adult family members, like an aunt or uncle
Faith leaders
Coaches
People from local mental health groups
Primary care physicians

These people can either directly provide needed support and help, or they can make referrals to outside resources or someone else who can offer help that’s more tailored to the situation. It’s important to learn to keep asking for help, even if the first person cannot offer the best assistance. Help is out there, and everyone deserves to get it!

As mentioned above, a primary care physician (also known as a “PCP”) is a good person to talk to about mental health. Some reasons to talk to your PCP include:

Provides easier access to care (quicker appointments, more convenient)
Has familiarity with medical history
Reduces or eases the stigma surrounding mental health symptoms and conditions
Offers easy access to many resources (such as a psychologist or social worker in their office, or screening tools)
Can help organize and arrange care
Is able to monitor progress

Watch the following video about how to talk to a PCP about mental health.

To find out more about seeking help for a mental health problem, visit Mental Health America or read our previously published blog post about finding the right healthcare professional.

How have you gone about teaching your child that it’s okay to ask for help? It can help others and ourselves, too, when we share our own experiences, so please comment below!

What is Stigma?

Recently, we were asked about stigma, specifically:

“What is stigma?”

Therefore, to help address this complicated topic, we thought we’d dedicate a blog post to it.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (or NAMI) refers to stigma as “when someone, or even yourself, views a person in a negative way because they have a mental health condition.” In other words, stigma is when an individual sees another person in a disapproving way because they have a certain characteristic or personality trait that is thought to be a disadvantage. Simply put stigma is a negative stereotype.

To help understand it better, imagine you broke your leg and society blames you. Others stare at you accusingly when you’re out in public and whisper about you behind your back. Imagine feeling scared to seek proper care because you’re worried that your partner will break up with you or you’ll lose your job if anyone finds out. People with mental health conditions deal with this type of stigma daily.

Continue reading What is Stigma?

CBT – explained by a comic

When you feel depressed or anxious, it can feel like you are just lost in your thoughts. A type of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy helps to teach you how to change your thoughts – by changing your thoughts, you can change your mood and how you deal with day-to-day events. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT is one of the most effective therapies for depression and anxiety in young people.

CBT describes a cycle starting with an Event.
A person responds to the Event with a Thought.
This Thought leads to an Emotion, and that Emotion leads to further Action.

Out of all of these, the easiest to change in the cycle are the Thoughts. Thoughts can come from an underlying belief system like, “I’m not good at anything.” This belief system is overly negative. CBT helps train you to think more rationally by using evidence in your life.

See the comic below for an example (click here if this doesn’t show up right below):

Continue reading CBT – explained by a comic

Reel Teens Pittsburgh Facebook Live Town Hall

If it’s your first time to wisesova.pitt.edu, welcome! Some of you may be just finding out about our site after watching the Reel Teens Pittsburgh Facebook Live Town Hall. The Reel Teens are an awesome group of local young filmmakers who interviewed me, Dr. Radovic, for their film about mental health. The film features the award-winning work of Stand Together, a peer-to-peer group organized through the Allegheny County’s Office of Behavioral Health. Stand Together encourages local middle and high school students to start talking and thinking about the stigma associated with mental illness and substance use. It’s something we and our SOVA ambassadors write a lot about on SOVA because we want to help young people understand that its okay to ask for help – becoming interdependent (knowing who and when to ask for help), not independent, is the goal of turning into an adult – and we want to help change negative attitudes about mental illness.

If you haven’t seen the Reel Teens’ video check it out below:

What did you think of the video? Let us know below!

The Environment and Depression

What does it mean when someone talks about environmental influences on the development of depression?

It means that factors in the environment – the world around us and our life experiences – can affect depression. This can include many factors such as: where we live, our income, our friends and families, who supports us, and even the media.

Studies show that certain factors can increase the risk of developing depression. These factors include:

being female
traumatic life experiences
certain medical illness
major life changes
not having social support and,
sexual or physical violence can increase the risk of developing depression.

Does this mean we are dealt a hand in life and we just have to deal with it? Not necessarily. It is helpful to know that just like there are environment factors that can put someone at risk, there are environment factors that can also protect!

The world health organization has a neat report looking at these influences which have been studied in depression.

Sometimes thinking about the environment and how it affects mental illness makes us feel like we are stuck. Sometimes we feel like our environment can’t be changed, but with the right support, we find it can be.

There is another way to look at it – what parts of our environment can help depression get better?

Click on the link to take a look at this chart from the world health organization: WHO

For example, the list points out that things like good communication skills can protect, while poor communication skills can be harmful.

What parts of your child’s environment do you feel could be changed with better outcomes to their physical and mental health?

An example might be that they did not have a good group of supportive friends, but then they got involved in a new after-school activity. Through this activity, they are now able to meet people who they can count on.

Another example is, maybe you and your child didn’t spend much time together and you wanted to change that, so now you both commit to spending time together during the week to do something fun. And now, because of this time together, you can communicate better with each other.

Sometimes when we feel down, our dark-colored glasses can make us think nothing can change. But when we get help with treatment to feel better, we see that sometimes the environment can change – and our world can get better. Have you tried to change your environment to make your children feel better? If you feel comfortable, please share your examples below!