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Coping with Social Anxiety

The SOVA Project is happy to feature this blog post written by one in our team of fantastic SOVA Ambassadors—these are young people who help create meaningful blog posts from adolescents’ perspectives.

Have you ever gone to a party or had to talk in front of others and felt sick to your stomach with anxiety about the prospect? Have you ever felt so nauseated and nervous that others are judging you the wrong way? If this is the case, you may be suffering with social anxiety, also known as social phobia. You always may have felt this way but were never able to put your finger on exactly what it was.

Suffering from social anxiety can be difficult in lots of ways, but finding the right help can ease your anxiety and help you socialize and enjoy being in the presence of others.

You might ask, But how can I get better?

Continue reading Coping with Social Anxiety

Turn “I’m Perfect” Into “Imperfect”

perfectionism-1 I was diagnosed with anxiety for the first time in third grade. Before that, my parents thought that I was just a shy, overly-rule-abiding young girl. I don’t think they thought that my nervous ticks or tendency to be moved to tears because I didn’t write my cursive “A” just right in second-grade handwriting was OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder. However, as I’ve grown up, I’ve truly learned how negative my compulsions can be, how they can debilitate me throughout the day, and how they can slow me down when it really counts.

Most of the time, my OCD appears at school. For me, school isn’t “prison” like the other kids say; I’ve always loved school, loved learning, and loved my friends. However as I’ve gotten older and everything points to this looming idea of college, school has turned into a place where I am trapped in my mind, with thoughts of what society wants me to be, expects me to achieve, swirling around in my head. The emphasis on getting perfect grades while balancing as many extracurriculars as possible, just so one college admissions officer looks at me and wants me in their school is a lot for me, as a really high achieving girl with dreams of going to Yale.

Continue reading Turn “I’m Perfect” Into “Imperfect”

Summer Reading List 2018

nypl — The New York Public Library has iconic statues of lions on its steps.

Summer is finally here, and for many young people this may mean months of sleeping late, hanging out with friends, vacationing, and continuous streaming of movies and television shows. However, it can also mean finding a good book (or two) to read!

Did you know there are some good reasons why reading paper books is nicer than reading anything electronically? One important reason: if you read a paper book, you’ll probably remember more. One study found that people who read stories in paper books are more likely to remember the events in the story than they are if they read an e-book. Continue reading Summer Reading List 2018

How Media Influences Self-Harm, And What We Can Do About It

In the past week or two, after the deaths of fashion designer Kate Spade and chef Anthony Bourdain, we have seen a great deal of reporting about suicide. Reading about these events, I’ve started to think about how news coverage—including social media sharing—of events like these can affect those of us with depression and anxiety.

There has been a lot of positive news coverage generated by celebrity positions on social issues. Many celebrities have brought awareness and positive attention to mental illness by sharing about the difficulties they have experienced. These types of stories have the potential to inspire readers who struggle and educate them about how to cope with symptoms of mental illness.

But media stories about mental health can also have a negative impact on people’s understanding of mental illness.

Continue reading How Media Influences Self-Harm, And What We Can Do About It

Antidepressant Warnings

It’s important to understand the risks of taking any medication. But it’s also important to understand where those risks came from.

There is a black box warning on antidepressants for children and young adults. This is a warning put out by the Food and Drug Association (FDA) to say that the medication might cause serious injury.

This warning is based on research studies which looked at the possible risks of taking an antidepressant. The studies done on medication are usually randomized controlled trials. The researchers will set certain rules about who can be in the study. Then once they agree to be in the study, the person is randomly selected either to get the real medicine or to get a fake medicine (placebo) which looks the same—or sometimes a different medicine. In the best studies, neither the patient nor the healthcare practitioner evaluating how well they are doing know which medicine they received. (See this link for more information explaining clinical trials.)

In 2004, the FDA looked at a study which combined the results of different studies or a meta-analysis of studies looking at children and adolescents taking antidepressants. They found that no one in these studies died from suicide. But some people did have more thoughts of suicide, or they attempted suicide.

In the group that didn’t get medicine, suicidal thoughts or behavior happened in 2% of the people.
In the group that did get medicine, suicidal thoughts or behavior happened in 4% of all the people.

Overall the risk was low in both groups. The risk in the group taking medicine then is thought to be higher by 2 people in 100 (2%).

The problem is, it is tough to know whether antidepressant medications increase the risk of suicide, because the illness they’re designed to treat—depression—increases the risk for suicide. We do know that many more young people experience benefits from antidepressants than experience suicidal thoughts or behavior.

Although it is hard to say what caused what, after the FDA warning came out in 2004, there were fewer antidepressant prescriptions. At the same time, suicide rates went up in young people.

It can be hard to know what to do. This is where health providers can be helpful to patients in thinking about how to weigh the risks and benefits.

What are the risks of doing nothing? What are the risks of doing something?
What are the benefits of doing nothing? What are the benefits of doing something?
What are the different alternatives for that something?

Either way it really helps to have a professional monitor you no matter what you decide to do, but especially when you start to take an antidepressant.

Does the research make sense to you? What further questions do you have that we can help answer?

Mr. Rogers: The Celebrity Who Taught Resilience and Self-Regard

“Would you be mine, could you be mine? Won’t you be…my neighbor?”

How many of us can still sing that song without a hitch?

On June 8, a new documentary was released to theaters recalling the life of a man who affected so many of our childhoods. Countless children felt like members Mr. Rogers’ beloved neighborhood, along with Daniel Striped Tiger, Mr. McFeely, and the rest of the neighbors.

Fred Rogers’ life was filled with fame and success, but he was quite unlike the celebrities we so often see on TV or on our phones. In one broadcast hour, Mr. Rogers made it his business to reach out to hundreds of thousands of children and teach them skills and attitudes that would protect their mental health. Rather than focusing primarily on advancing his career, he sought to make a kind, thoughtful generation. As a Christian minister trained at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, he took it upon himself to use the power of his position on television to teach children about moral values. Check out this article to learn more about Mr. Rogers’s life.

Mr. Rogers’ mission was to devote his life to caring for and developing strengths and resilience in the coming generations. He worked very closely with several University of Pittsburgh scholars, notably Dr. Margaret McFarland, a child psychologist and Pitt faculty member. He was extremely interested in child development, and Dr. McFarland helped him include her reliable academic knowledge in his media content. Visit this website to learn more about Mr. Rogers’ work at Pitt.

Armed with advice from Dr. McFarland, a few unique songs that he wrote himself, and his distinctive voice that created characters out of puppets, Mr. Rogers taught young viewers about real world issues and values for over 40 years. A mild-mannered person, he still didn’t shy away from difficult issues, such as civil rights, conflict resolution, depression, disability, and divorce.

His teachings about self-love stayed with his audiences throughout their lives, helping to create a foundation for positive self-regard that is the basis for resilience later in life. His overriding message: each viewer was special just for being themselves! Many of his messages and songs still remain in the hearts and minds of adults today. One of the neighbors from the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe” now has his own show for young children, called Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

Did you feel like a member of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, too? What are your fondest memories of watching Mr. Rogers’ show? Let us know in the comments!

To learn more about Pittsburgh’s own Mr. Rogers, check out his new documentary in theatres now. And remember, you are special!

People of Color & Mental Illness Photo Project

Screen Shot 2018-06-18 at 12.42.28 PM Mental illness is often seen as a “white person’s disease”—a product of privilege, a chosen illness. It is represented in the media by people who are white, while those who are not suffer in silence. The most important thing to remember is that mental illness does not discriminate according to race—or any other demographic, including class, gender, and so on.

To counter racial misunderstanding and foster positive attitudes toward mental health, Dior Vargas, a Latina mental health activist, created The People of Color and Mental Illness Photo Project. It aims to change the way mental illness is represented in our society, giving a voice to those in underrepresented communities who also suffer from these diseases, by raising awareness and positive self-regard.

Vargas is also a keynote speaker who travels and hosts workshops at various colleges and universities. She aims to raise awareness and change the way we view mental illness. To see her upcoming workshops and the scope of her work, check out her website.

If you’d like to participate in her photo project, send in a photo of yourself holding a sign that says “I’m [your name] and I have a mental illness [or the exact type].” Some examples and more directions about how to submit can be found here!

How racially diverse is your circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues? How might it change your attitudes about your own mental health to submit a photograph of yourself with a personal statement? Share with us in the comments!

Say It Out Loud

We at SOVA are mental-health and communications professionals, and we use those skills to design blogs that give young people and their families information about mental illness in manageable portions that you can grasp. For example, here are just a few facts about the reality of living with mental illness as an American teen:

one in five teens lives with a mental health condition
more than half of those are not getting the help they need
stigma remains a huge barrier to teens who are seeking that help
teens who don’t seek help say they are afraid of peers perceiving them negatively

Statistics and facts like these can help put mental health issues in perspective. But the parts of our blogs to which many readers relate most closely are people’s stories.

Our hope is that SOVA will make it easier and less scary for you as the parent or caregiver of a teen with mental illness to share your experiences with others, and that together we can form a network of peers who can provide support for each other as you negotiate your challenges.

Continue reading Say It Out Loud

What To Do When You Hear A Joke About Mass Shootings

I wrote a couple of blogs (here and here) about the Stand Together project and its year-end celebrations among its middle and high-school students who work to bring greater awareness to their fellow students about mental illness and treatment. And I was a little haunted by something that the high-schoolers told me about their biggest stress on social media:

The worst is when people joke about school shootings. If they don’t like a particular teacher, they’ll say, ‘That teacher is why people shoot up schools.’

They also reported that kids say worse things—but we’re not going to repeat what they said here, because of what’s called “contagion”: sometimes when someone is close to being violent, hearing or reading something provocative or intense about violence could tip that person over the edge and accelerate their movement toward committing a violent act.

So says Jack Rozel, MD, MSL, who works as medical director at “resolve Crisis Services” in Pittsburgh. People call resolve’s number when they have a mental health emergency. You hear it all the time on the voice-mails of therapists: “If you’re having an emergency, go to the nearest emergency room, or call resolve.”

Dr. Rozel specializes in emergency psychiatry and is a national expert in gun violence. Last year he published a super informative paper in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology about links between mental illness and gun violence.

Here is some of what he said . . . and at the end are some tips he had for what to do if you hear people joking about school shootings.

Continue reading What To Do When You Hear A Joke About Mass Shootings