Providing a
haven for mentally ill young adults
|
"Thomas Mountain, 29, sits next to Bipolar Bear while having a cup of
coffee in the Group Room at Daniel's Place in Santa Monica. Daniel's
Place assists people ages 18 to 30 who are experiencing their first
episodes of mental illness....
"It's not at all typical for a
27-year-old man to enlist Buster the Bunny and Peter the Penguin to
facilitate conversations with his mother.
"But Jan Kyas can tell
his plush go-betweens things he finds it hard to say directly to
people. His mother, Jirina Kyas, has embraced this communion; she talks
to them as well when speaking right to her son doesn't work.
"A
former high school percussionist and Santa Monica College graduate, the
young man learned as an adult that he suffers from Asperger's syndrome,
a form of autism characterized by difficulties with social and
communication skills, and the often attendant depression and anxiety.
"He
carries the stuffed animals in his backpack. Kyas has no qualms about
trotting out his inanimate menagerie when he visits Daniel's Place..."
Continued in article: A
safe haven for mentally ill young adults.
Also see the page Mental health: teen / young adult, and Mental health & fitness articles.
Posted on Teen / Young Adult Talent
|
| Susan
Smalley: ADHD is beneficial to humanity |
 Susan
L. Smalley, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and
Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, and founder of the Mindful Awareness
Research Center.
In her article Living And Loving ADHD,
she writes about her husband Kevin Wall who, along with Al Gore, just
won an Environmental Media Award for the creation of Live Earth.
She
notes that she studies "exactly what my husband embodies - the mind of
someone with ADHD - creative, novelty-seeking, a 'connector',
intuitive, and happy.."
She adds, "Although ADHD is still
classified a disorder because of the challenges individual's face with
it, I'm more convinced everyday that it is a way of thinking and
processing the world that is so beneficial to humanity, we must turn
our attention to it."
[The image is from the book ADHD in Adults: What the Science Says.]
Also see more material on the page ADD / ADHD.
|
| Punishing and
sabotaging ourselves |
 Princess
Diana is among many people who have self-harmed. She admitted cutting
her arms and legs, explaining, "You have so much pain inside yourself
that you try and hurt yourself on the outside because you want help."
[From the page Cutting.]
Physical
self-harm is a complex experience, not simply explained as just a cry
for help. And some physical modifications like tattooing and piercing
are accepted and even culturally sanctioned.
Most of us don't engage in cutting, but we may still self-injure in
more secret, emotional ways.
In his article The role of self-punishment in Dis-ease,
counselor Steve Wells mentions a participant in one of his workshops
who had a migraine severe enough she was thinking of leaving.
"I
asked her what she felt might have brought on the migraine," Wells
writes, "and she told me that she had been a 'bad girl' and had a
coffee earlier that morning and this migraine was clearly coming on 'as
a punishment' for having had that coffee!
More on TDR
|
| Anne-Sophie
Dutoit on filmmaking |
Anne-Sophie Dutoit wrote her film "Faded Memories" at 14, and was 16
when she made the film (with a budget under $1 million), about "a
teenager with a phobia of being touched by others," as summarized in a
Los Angeles Times article.
"I wanted to see another kind of
movie," Dutoit says. "I started writing a movie I wanted to see and
what my friends would want to see. I based my character on people I
knew and feelings that I felt. Everybody kind of feels lonely in their
life."
Dutoit graduated early from high school last June and is
set to start majoring in psychology at Santa Monica City College in
January; she is hoping to finish the psych degree at Stanford
University. She decided not to major in cinema, because "psychology
would help me to deal with actors."
Continued in article Anne-Sophie Dutoit: 16 going on 40.
Posted on Teen / Young Adult Talent |
|
|
|
|
| Quotes |
"We don't always know what makes us happy. We know, instead, what we
think SHOULD. We are baffled and confused when our attempts at
happiness fail... We are mute when it comes to naming accurately our
own
preferences, delights, gifts, talents.
"The voice of our
original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the
voices of other people's expectations. The tongue of the original self
is the language of the heart."
-- Julia Cameron - author of Walking in this World: The Practical Art of Creativity
~ ~ ~
"Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what
sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit."
William James |
|
|
