Tag: Mental health

Creativity: Running out of ideas…

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I have been struggling with a topic for this week’s blog. The only thing that has come across my path that feels compelling is the hummingbird who showed up at our coral honeysuckle on Sunday. Unfortunately, integrating that ruby throat into my article does not seem like an easy task.

Sometimes, I feel like I have run out of ideas. When that happens, I am reminded of feelings I experienced as a child and young adult. I knew I was not an artist and felt myself also to be not creative.

It took many years before I learned that my creativity takes forms different than that of artistic individuals. At some point in the process of doing psychotherapy with some very difficult clients, I realized that most of my creativity takes the form of what I will call creative alternativism. Generating possibilities…especially possibilities for different types of behavior and different kinds of thinking…was the primary manifestation of that creativity. Helping my clients find different ways to be in the world in order to overcome their pain and problems was the most important way I expressed that creative urge.

I have since realized that I often apply that process to myself as well. Since I can be a pretty rigid person when it comes to my own thinking and behavior, I have found that I need to make systematic efforts to implement the alternatives I generate for myself. I may well come up with many ideas about how to change my behavior, but I need structure to implement those changes.

Three years ago, I knew that adding yoga into my fitness efforts would benefit my arthritic joints and relieve some of my stress. Signing up for a yoga class was the structure that allowed me to make that a regular part of my activities. After three years, I have found other structures to help me extend that one class to two and now into a daily practice. I need and use structure to implement the possible changes I creatively generate for myself.

I had an email this week from a colleague I have not seen in years. I was delighted to learn that for the past year, she has been painting! At age 60, she took a pastels class at her local community college. She was hooked on the medium and has found a new outlet for her creativity. In my experience, she has always been creative. She has been a psychologist and psychotherapist for her entire professional life. She has researched and written and published…an aspect of her professional creativity; and now, she paints!

I am delighted to know that a new aspect of creative expression can manifest itself at any age, as long as we are open to it.

How do you express your creativity? Do you manage to do this within your professional life? Does the place you work benefit from your creative endeavors, or is it just for you?

Please share your thoughts about creativity, regenerating it, and keeping our lives…and blog topics…fresh.

Prevention and Pain: A major way to save money

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This morning I read an editorial (An ounce of prevention could heal a pound of pain) by Dina Overland of the FierceHealthPayer newsletter. She decided to use her platform as the editor of a newsletter that is aimed at insurance payers to directly address those payers about prevention of healthcare problems and diminishing future costs. She focused on an area that behavioral health and substance abuse professionals work in often . . . pain.

Ms. Overland’s review of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) report on pain and prevention cited some facts I had not heard.

Chronic pain affects 116 million Americans–that’s more people than affected by heart disease, cancer, and diabetes combined–and costs the United States
$635 billion each year. That’s what the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found in its report, Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education and Research.

If that’s not jarring enough, here are some more staggering facts: The United States spends $2 trillion on healthcare, but only 4 cents of every dollar goes to prevention and public health, despite being among the best tools to reduce spending. For every $1 invested in prevention, we save $6 in projected healthcare costs, says Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who participated in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)’s announcement
of its guidelines to incorporating prevention throughout the healthcare industry.

***

 

I could not help but think about the number of people who would never have become substance abusers if their chronic pain had been addressed and treated at an early stage. How many behavioral health clients have you treated for depression after years of experiencing intractable pain?

The IOM and HHS see the coordination of care among primary care providers and specialists as the best way to address early intervention and prevention of pain. What role should mental health and substance abuse providers play in this coordination? How many of your patients also experience chronic pain? Where do behavioral health providers fit in?

Please share your thoughts and comments below. What role do you want to play in diminishing healthcare costs? Who should we see when it hurts?

 

APA and Public Education in Behavioral Health

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In a previous life, when I was actively involved in the American Psychological Association (APA), I was for three years a member of and one year the chair of the Public Information Committee of the APA. Prior to that, I hosted a live, call-in television show for two years. Frankly Speaking with Dr. Kathy Peres was entirely focused on educating the public about psychological matters. I believe that public education about how mental health issues affect our day-to-day lives is a significant responsibility of all professionals and organizations that provide services in the behavioral health arena.

Given that belief, I was very pleased today to receive an email from the APA announcing a new series of videos and podcasts by APA CEO, Norman B. Anderson, Ph.D. You can view the introduction and the first two installations in the series This is Psychology, one on bullying and another on children’s mental health.

APA invites you to place these links on your own professional web sites and to share them and the information they contain as broadly as possible.

Last week, I wrote about potential problems with use of social media in your organization. Public education of this sort. . .including sharing of the information created on Twitter and FaceBook is one arena in which I think social media has the potential for more power than in any other area of our professional lives.

How does your organization participate in education of the public about behavioral health issues? Please share your initiatives and activities here so others can communicate them more broadly for you.

Self-Awareness and Personal Responsibility

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The holiday last Monday made it difficult to get to my blog. As each new item that I needed to handle came up, I found myself thinking about what I had hoped to write. Thinking about it was all I managed. No matter how much I thought, I did not discipline myself to leave all the other items aside and write.

Self-discipline is not one of the things I have been short on in my life. I was raised and educated in a setting that strongly taught the need for and benefits of taking responsibility for my own thoughts and actions and shaping them to the way I wanted and needed them to be. The last ten years have included many times when it was harder than ever before to focus myself and move forward, but because I have long known the methods that are most effective for me to achieve self-discipline, I have been able to do so. Taking personal responsibility is second nature for me (except, of course, in the areas where I have complete blind spots!).

For me, this self-discipline has resulted in a strong tendency to take action. . . in pretty much any situation in which I deem action to be necessary. If I have allowed a few extra pounds to creep on, I act to reduce my caloric intake and increase my activity. If I am driving or walking somewhere and have become lost (and don’t happen to have a GPS with me), I ask for directions. If a cause in which I believe is being threatened, I make contributions and write emails. I have always seen it as my responsibility to take action when I could and when it was necessary.

I am currently reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go There You Are. . . one small section at a time. This week, the following paragraph struck me:

What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings. This sense of participation and trust is all too frequently a missing ingredient in medicine. We call it “mobilizing the inner resources of the patient” for healing, or for just coping better, for seeing a little more clearly, for being a little more assertive, for asking more questions, for getting by more skillfully. It’s not a replacement for expert medical care, but it is a necessary complement to it if you hope to live a truly healthy life—especially in the face of disease, disability, health challenges, and a frequently alienating, intimidating, insensitive, and sometimes iatrogenic healthcare system.

Developing such an attitude means authoring one’s own life and, therefore, assuming some measure of authority oneself. It requires believing in oneself. (My italics)

Most individuals who work in behavioral healthcare are expert at helping others to mobilize their inner resources. This is a large part of what psychotherapy is about. For the seriously mentally ill, helping them see that they have inner resources is significant. . . and a major contributor to the process of recovery.

I have a great deal of difficulty with the large number of people who see the things in their lives going wrong and who feel they can do nothing or who choose to take a passive rather than an active posture. . . but gladly complain about all that is wrong. Listen to talk radio, stand around the metaphorical office ‘water cooler’, shake their heads saying ‘what is this world coming to?’. . . and then go on with their own little lives as if nothing else matters.

I am currently watching this budget debacle unfold in state legislatures (I live in Florida) and Congress. As we all know, the recession and unemployment have resulted in significantly lower tax revenues at every level of government. We have allowed those who represent us to pass laws virtually exempting the wealthy and large corporations from taxation while they rake in the profits. The rest of us continue to pay our sales and property and income taxes, but the working and middle classes just do not earn enough or pay enough in taxes to support the level of government spending that we have all demanded.

The decisions that are being made will most likely result in the deconstruction of the ‘safety net’ that has for the past twenty years provided some minimal care for the chronically mentally ill. As usual, those least able to speak up for themselves will pay the price. . . for the mortgage crisis, unfunded wars, and irresponsible tax cuts.

What is the responsibility of each one of us for the upcoming deconstruction of Medicaid, and possibly Social Security and Medicare? How do you feel about sitting around and complaining vs taking action? Who’s job is it, anyway? Please share your comments below.

Happiness and Optimism: Enhancing mental and physical health

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Wednesday, May 18, 2011 is American Psychological Association’s Mental Health Month Blog Party. This post is dedicated to Mental Health and Mental Health Awareness.

This past weekend, we rode 104 miles in the BikeMS Citrus Tour 2011. One of the fun parts of the weekend was getting to spend a few hours with our friend Wayne, one of the people for whom we ride. Wayne and his wife are two of the most positive, forward-looking people I know. While they struggle through the difficult patches that MS dishes out, they maintain a positive, happy focus on life.

As a person who tends more in the pessimistic direction sometimes struggling with depressive emotions, I am always inspired by those who are naturally optimistic and happy or who have set out to become so. Last summer, I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and in September, started my own project. While I have not completed the formal project, I learned a great deal in the process.

One of the most important things I learned is that I need to focus on happiness in order to become happier. Unless I make my own happiness and well-being a priority, it will never just happen because of events outside myself. Because of my tendency toward negative thinking and pessimism, I have accepted Gretchen’s offer of a ‘happiness’ quote in my inbox each weekday. The ‘Moment of Happiness‘ daily quotation helps me focus, however briefly, on a thought aimed at Happiness. I have collected a few of my favorites and placed them in a notepad on the desktop of my computer. I love to be reminded each time I turn on my computer of Lao Tse’s statement…one of my favorites since my teen years:

Kindness in words creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.
Kindness in giving creates love.
—Lao Tse

A new favorite is a quotation from Henry James:

Three things in human life are important:
The first is to be kind.
The second is to be kind.
And the third is to be kind.
—Henry James

Reminding myself of these things daily helps correct my own natural tendency. Giving myself the structure within which to work at happiness helps me to move in that direction.

One of the most important things about this process is that it has effects on both mental health and physical health. Dr. Andrew Weil is a well known integrative medicine expert who has written widely. His blog on Monday focused on the physical health benefits of being happy. Dr. Weil reported on a study in the March 2011 issue of Applied Psychology, Health and Well-Being. The happier and more positive you are, the healthier you are likely to be and the longer you are likely to live. Positive expectations about health events seem also to be correlated with better progress after the events. It appears that working to be happier ourselves can have a significant impact on our physical and mental health.

To go a step further, Dr. Weil suggests that having happy friends is one of the best ways to increase our own happiness. Surrounding ourselves with people who have a positive focus on life and who tend toward cheerfulness can significantly increase our own experience of happiness.

None of these comments are intended to minimize the serious impact that clinical depression has on the lives of those who are so afflicted, but our own thoughts and behavior can reinforce that depression or help improve it. Working to be a happier person and to surround ourselves with other people who are happy can be an invaluable contribution to our own physical and mental health.

We strongly hope that Wayne’s positive attitude will help him stay healthy and even recover some of what he has lost.

Please share your comments below.

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