7 Tips to Help a Distracted Child
Simple changes such as keeping a calm home environment, limiting media distractions and enrolling your child in sports will help a child who is inattentive or having problems focusing on his or her school work. They are also useful for any child and can even prevent inattentiveness in an ever-more-distracting world.
Increasing Physical Activity in Schools May Improve Mental Health
A new article suggests integrating physical activity throughout the day may help to address the mental health of students.
7 Tasks for a Parent Whose Child Is Diagnosed with a Mental Illness
When I teach workshops or lead discussions on coming off psychiatric drugs and alternatives, there are invariably parents present who are at loose ends. They want to know how best to help their children, and how it can be possible for their child to live without medication. Here are seven ideas I share with them that may also help you.
Antipsychotics Associated with High Risk of Death in Children
A new study has found that children and adolescents taking a high dose of antipsychotics are almost twice as likely to die of any cause than children on other types of medications.
Growing Evidence for the Link Between ADHD Diagnosis and Age at School Admission
Researchers detect a striking relationship between the month of school enrollment relative to peers and patterns of ADHD diagnoses in a large sample of elementary school students throughout the US.
Q&A: Dad Is Coercing Son to Get Off Meds
My son was diagnosed with schizophrenia five years ago and now lives in a residential facility with a holistic treatment approach. However, his father has repeatedly and aggressively tried to coerce him to get off medication. My son and his provider have repeatedly asked him to stop, and the stress of his father’s pressure is setting him back. What should we do?
Belongingness Can Protect Against Impact of Trauma, Study Suggests
A new study explores feelings of belongingness as a protective factor for childhood trauma and adult mental health outcomes.
Childhood Bipolar Disorder, Deconstructed
Diagnosing children with juvenile or pediatric bipolar disorder is largely an American phenomenon. Do we actually have more “bipolar” children in the United States—or are we simply labeling more of them as such? If it is ever fair to call a child “manic,” isn’t the child’s environment the direction in which we should look?
Treated Infections in Childhood Linked with Later Mental Health Service Use
Severe infections requiring hospitalizations increased the risk of hospital contacts due to mental disorders by 84% and the risk of psychotropic medication use by 42%.
Increased Suicidality in Cymbalta Trial for Fibromyalgia in Teens
A new as-yet-unpublished trial of duloxetine (Cymbalta) for fibromyalgia has presented more evidence of suicidal events in teens.
Why My Daughter Died and I Lived
To be a parent of a suicidal child is to be in a terrible position, where you hold in your hands the life most valuable to you and know that any slip of your hands may end that life. In the 1970s, my suicidality was treated nonmedically and I lived. In the 2000s, my daughter Martha’s suicidality was treated medically and she died.
Study Highlights Mental Health Consequences of Parent Emotion Suppression
New research suggests that when parents model emotion suppression strategies in social interactions, their children’s approaches to social engagement may suffer.
Q&A: My Child is Being Bullied
I have a young son who is being verbally bullied by his peers. He is a sensitive child— thin, wears glasses, athletic and intelligent. I suspect the problem may be related to anti-Semitism. I feel like telling him that he needs to fight the bullies with his fists. His mother advises him to ignore the bullies and to concentrate on his studies. What would you advise?
Research Progresses on Mindfulness Based Interventions for Adolescents
A new meta-analysis analyzes randomized control trials of Mindfulness-Based Interventions for adolescents.
Researchers Warn of “Brain Atrophy” in Children Prescribed Antipsychotics
Researchers discuss the evidence that antipsychotic medications may cause brain atrophy in children, whose brains are still developing.
Invisible Trauma: The Children Left Behind When Parents Are Hospitalized
It would take decades before I recognized the trauma caused by repeatedly being separated from my mom when she was hospitalized. I grieved almost exactly the way children did who had lost a parent to death. Yet it was grief without closure because my mom was not dead, just... gone.
The Real Attention Deficit Disorder
The fact that we shame people for acting like they need attention (and for actually needing attention) is self-defeating and maddening, not to mention absurd. Living in a society that punishes people for having fundamental needs like attention is probably one of the reasons people have developed behaviors “just” to “get attention.”
Exploring the Role of Community Engagement in School Psychology
New research emphasizes the impact of school connectedness and community engagement interventions on students' mental health.
Outcomes of Childhood Bullying on Young Adults’ Wellbeing
A qualitative study explores young adults’ childhood bullying experiences.
Childhood Emotional Abuse Associated with Internal Eating Disorder Voice
Many individuals diagnosed with eating disorders describe and internal ‘voice,’ which may be linked to experiences of childhood trauma and dissociation.
MIA Update: Our Parent Resources Initiative and More
Regular MIA readers may have noticed that we recently added a content box on the front page titled “Parent Resources.” This initiative has been a long time coming, and it is one that we hope will help us reach—and serve—a new group of readers. Many parents writing to us are desperately looking for a way out of the conventional system.
Current Immigration Policies Create Mental Health Vulnerabilities for Families
Researchers investigate the impact of immigration policies on the mental health of arriving Mexican and Central American immigrants.
Helping Children With Angry Outbursts
Finnish psychiatrist Ben Furman reviews various non-drug therapies for children with aggressive outbursts of anger, including the Kids' Skills approach that he and social psychologist Tapani Ahola developed. These approaches focus on helping children come up with their own ideas for overcoming their problems with the help of family and friends.
New Video Series: ‘Parenting Today’
This series of thirty video interviews with leading experts from around the world is designed to help parents better understand how to raise strong, resilient kids and how to deal with the pressures exerted on them by the current dominant “mental disorder” paradigm. We hope that this interview series will provide helpful ideas that you may not be able to get anywhere else. The interviews can be found HERE.
Memoirs of a Dissident Psychiatrist
For years I had hoped that psychiatry would free itself from the psychoanalytic doctrine, and when my wish finally came true, my profession went from the frying pan to the fire. My main goal, currently, is to convince professionals as well as the public that most child psychiatric problems can be handled effectively without medication.
