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Medical Journals Refuse to Retract Fraudulent Trial Reports That Omitted Suicidal Events in Children
Charles Spencer’s Story of Boarding School Abuse Is Haunting
Engaging Voices, Part 1: Validating The Arrival of My Wife’s First ‘Alters’
"Mad in the Family" Podcast
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EDITOR'S CORNERS
Blogs & Personal Stories
Engaging Voices, Part 1: Validating The Arrival of My Wife’s First ‘Alters’
My Lived Experience Helps Others Heal: Working with Families on the Path to Recovery
Reflections on the Silicon Valley Teen Suicides-by-Train: Fifteen Years Later
Archives: Popular Posts from the Past
Editor's Corner
Going Outside: The Real World’s Impact on Youth Mental Health
For children, teens, and young people in towns and cities everywhere, community matters to mental health. Socializing matters. Having activities and safe destinations in the real world—and having the freedom, the agency, to get there—matters enormously, whether the human being in question is enrolled in grade school or navigating their 20s.
Or navigating their 90s. But as Michelle Goldberg articulated in a recent piece for The New York Times, the impact of social media use and screentime on younger generations means that youth are spending less and less time in three dimensions and more and more time in addictive and toxic cyberspace. “If we want to start getting kids offline,” she writes, “we need to give them better places to go instead. . . . We need a lot more places — parks, food courts, movie theaters, even video arcades — where kids can interact in person.”
One reason kids spend so much time inside on their phones is, she points out, widespread parental fear of letting them loose into an unsafe world. Interestingly, a similar call for community engagement and healthy in-person interaction was issued in a recent article in Nature that focused on urban youths specifically, urging cities to do more to support their mental health—such as providing safe spaces for socializing.
Family Newsletter
Support Groups
MIA offers moderated, online peer-support groups for parents of both minor and adult children. The U.S./Canada group meets each Tuesday on a drop-in basis. The U.S./Europe group meets on the second Thursday of each month. Learn more and sign up here.
For info on other online and in-person support groups, including those for parents and families, click here. To suggest more for the list, please email [email protected].
Q&A: What Is Executive Function, and How Can Parents and Teachers Help Kids Focus? In her latest piece, author, teacher, and advocate Ann Bracken describes EF and lays out multiple approaches designed to aid teachers, parents, and teens themselves.
Do you have a question of your own? Submit it for an online reply. For past Q&As on a range of topics, check out the archives.
Psychiatric Drug Info
Did you know:
- That longer-term studies of children given a diagnostic label of ADHD have found worse outcomes for medicated youth?
- In a large NIMH study, researchers concluded that few youth “benefit long-term” from antipsychotics (neuroleptic drugs)?
- That use of marijuana, stimulants, and antidepressants increase the risk that a youth will receive a diagnostic label of bipolar disorder?
Research on psychiatric drug use in children and adolescents
- Stimulants for children with a diagnostic label of ADHD
- Antidepressants for children with a diagnostic label of depression/anxiety
- Antipsychotics (neuroleptics) for children with a diagnostic label of psychosis, bipolar disorder, and more
Research on non-drug treatments
- Non-drug approaches for ADHD
- Non-drug approaches for depression
- Non-drug approaches for psychosis, bipolar disorder, and more
Resources Information on withdrawal from psychiatric drugs. Directory of therapists/providers who support drug withdrawal.