Category Archives: Mental Health

Obituary for My Mother, Ann Marie (Nancy) Stoppleworth

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Ann Marie (Nancy) Stoppleworth passed away on July 22, 2011 in Providence, RI. She was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on August 3, 1925, the oldest daughter of Mary and William Dwyer. Nancy was a graduate of Saint Francis Nursing School for her RN, Georgetown University for her Bachelors degree in Nursing, and The University of Connecticut for her Masters degree in Anthropology. She joined the convent twice as a young woman before choosing to live the secular life. She married Leland J. Stoppleworth on July 5, 1958, and was the mother of seven children.

Nancy led a successful career as a nurse and nursing administrator, serving as a nurse in many hospitals, visiting nursing services, and finally as the Chief of Nursing for the State of Connecticut Mental Health Services. Nancy was a devout lifelong Catholic who carried out the church’s mission of charity in myriad ways including serving the homeless in soup kitchens and shelters, caring for poor families in the community, participating in prayer groups and prayer lines for the sick, traveling to Haiti for charitable mission work, and establishing charitable annuities for medical and educational purposes with Maryknoll Sisters and Salesian missions.

In 2004, Nancy donated 55 acres of land to the town of Tolland, Connecticut in order to create the Stoppleworth Conservation area, a pristine and beautiful open space for all to enjoy. Nancy was a lifelong journal-writer, who left behind scores of honest and brave reflections on her many life dilemmas, successes, and concerns. She loved reading and knowledge, swimming in Bolton Lake, going to the beach, and spending time with her children and grandchildren.

She is survived by two sisters, Helen Stephenson and Lyn Jacoby, who reside in California, and six of her seven children: Laura Reave and husband Robert Reave of London, Ontario; Amalia Delorenzo of Guerneville, California; Anne Weber and husband Garry Weber of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Maria Dugan and husband Douglas Dugan of Brooklyn, New York; John Stoppleworth and wife Janice Kloo of Manchester, Connecticut; and Kiersten Marek and husband Kevin Marek of Cranston, Rhode Island. Her youngest child, Angela, died in childhood due to a muscular disease. She is also survived by grandchildren Melanie Reave; Seth Martel; Bryan, Paul, and Charles Weber; Elena, Avra, Isaiah and Patrick Dugan; and Katrina and Kalliana Marek.

Services for Nancy will take place at Church of the Ascension, 390 Pontiac Avenue, Cranston at 10 am on Wednesday, July 27, with reception to follow. Donations in lieu of flowers may be made to Maryknoll Sisters, P.O. Box 311, Maryknoll NY 10545.

Calling Hours will be from 6 – 8 PM at our home at 109 Waterman Avenue on Tuesday evening. Please send an email to me if you are planning to come.

The Warrior in All of Us

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Oh, the warriors within us!  Longfellow said it eloquently:  ”If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s … suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Indeed.  And yet, we do find many things to argue about.  Usually it’s not so much about the subject as it is about someone being on your turf.

As parents we spend a certain amount of energy interacting with our warrior children — hopefully this is only a small part of your relationship, but sometimes it can go on for too long, and it might be worth further exploring your internal warrior — the part of you that engages quickly in conflict, the part that escalates even as you know it isn’t good, not right or healthy or even sane.

Same holds true for marriages.  Hopefully you are not spending the majority of your time interacting with your partner’s warrior, but we’ve all been there, and when it gets really ugly, it’s no fun.  John Gottman talks about the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse and one of them is “contempt.”  When the conflict gets to the point that you genuinely begin to feel contempt for your partner, it’s time to get help.

I enjoy helping clients explore the parts of them that get in the way of harmonious relationships, the parts that bring more conflict into their lives than they need or want. Sometimes what lies beneath the fightin’ mad part of us is a very interesting part — a creator or a fool or an innocent — who wants to enjoy life or work at something more important.  But with the warrior always being in conflict, these other archetypes don’t get the time and attention that they deserve.

(cross-posted from my private practice site.)

 

Afraid of Our Own Shadow

Posted on by ninjanurse

Early visit is cancelled and I’m psyched for work but stalled for a half hour. The TV is on, Anthony Hopkins is starring in a re-make of ‘The Exorcist’. I’m still just Catholic enough that this stuff creeps me out, and Pagan/Earth Religion enough that I have several effective recipes for pest removal, even non-corporeal pests. Really.

So what’s with the new interest in exorcism? There’s a reality show planned, the Pope is seriously promoting it, evangelists consider it a part of their usual ministry– some are casting out gay demons in people who are just too fabulous.

Having firsthand experience in exorcism (more common than you might think) I take a materialistic view. People are in pain, they are frightened. Our own unacceptable shadow side can scare and torment us. Sometimes it is actually therapeutic to externalize what we can’t manage and ritually cast it out. Hey, my nursing philosophy is ‘whatever works’.

But since everything is political, I have to wonder. Is this the literal-minded demonization of the other? Fear of some kind of miscegenation of the spirit? A need for a purge of internal enemies? Desire for a dramatic showdown and victory, after which everything will be pure?

My experience of exorcism is that it scares the heck out of people but has little lasting effect. You can’t cut off parts of your self and throw them away– you are you. You can’t escape your own shadow, you just have to accept that there’s no vision without the dark and the light. The more you understand yourself, the less you are at risk of saying or doing something you will instantly regret, or causing such offense that others will have to sit on you.

I don’t know if the latest ‘Exorcist’ will drive some troubled people into treatment, and scare more into denying their own full self. It will probably rake in the bucks, though. We live in anxious times.

The Wild Hunt is a thoughtful Pagan blog, and they have great coverage including a witch’s interview with the priest featured in ‘The Rite’. Check it out here.

Fun de Mental (x 10)

Posted on by David Jaffe

How are you feeling today? Tense? Tentative? Tender? I ask because of the uniqueness of the date. It’s 10/10/10. The tenth day of the tenth month of the tenth year of the century. Isn’t that intenth? Twice today, unless you’re on military time, it will be 10:10 on 10/10/10. Outside of the Playboy Mansion, where are you going to see so many 10′s? (Apropos of nothing, wouldn’t it be apropos if the Playboy Mansion were located in Silicon Valley?) For most of us, the novelty of this date is cause for mild interest. For some others, perhaps members of an obscure religious cult that believe a confluence of binary numbers is a sign of the apocalypse, today is cause for anxiety or depression or delusional rapture.

Fortunately, today is also World Mental Health Day. In honor of this special occasion, the crack pundits at Kmareka are taking a crack at identifying 10 individuals who appear to be cracked in some measure. Why? Because we want you to feel good about your mental health. And what better way to bask in the flickering glow of your sanity than to ogle all the wackier folks in your midst? So here goes. We’ve sifted through the Chex Party Mix that passes for news these days and, in no particular order, pulled out these 10 nuts:

1. Kenneth E. Bonds – This fellow from Memphis appears to have some anger management and impulse control issues, not to mention an aggressive sense of fashion. A couple of weeks back, as reported by the Scripps Howard News Service, Bonds “began yelling at two youths, ages 16 and 17, about pulling up their pants” and then “pulled a black semiautomatic pistol from his waistband” and “fired several shots, hitting the older youth in the buttock.”

2. Talmadge D. Littlejohn – This Mississippi judge may have a God complex, believing either that he is above the law or that his robe confers superpowers upon him. Last week, as reported by the Jackson Clarion Ledger, Littlejohn jailed an attorney “on a contempt of court [charge] for failing to recite the pledge of allegiance in open court.” In so doing, he “ignored what most in the nation’s legal community deemed to be a question of settled law” since 1943.

3. Rick Santorum - The former Senator from Pennsylvania apparently resides in an alternate universe where up is down and the George W. Bush years were the good ol’ days. Last Thursday, as reported by Think Progress, Santorum went on Fox News and claimed that, “under the Bush administration…poverty among African Americans and among single unmarried women…was at the lowest rate ever in the history of this country. So Obama’s policies are not working. Bush policies worked. For a long time as a matter of fact.” Unfortunately, “there’s one small problem with Santorum’s claim — it’s completely false….Under Bush, the number of Americans living in poverty jumped an astonishing 26.1 percent.” African Americans and single mothers grew more impoverished. The only thing poorer is Sanotorum’s grasp on reality.

4. James Fletcher – This Brit made a bizarre spectacle of himself last week when he crashed a book-launching party for Jonathan Franzen in London and then “proceeded to steal the author’s glasses off his face, leaving a ransom note with a demand for $100,000 and a Hotmail address by way of contact.” His rationale, as he related to GQ Magazine, was that the party was “dull,” so he “decided to do something.”

5. Charlie Davies – This professional soccer player likes to pull a fast one. As reported by the Associated Press, Davies “nearly died in a car crash last year” yet was apprehended by French police last weekend “for going 125 mph.” He later claimed to have switched places in the vehicle with his teammate.

6. Sharron Angle – This candidate for the U.S. Senate in Nevada appears to suffer from paranoia and Islamophobia. As reported in the Associated Press, she recently “told a crowd of supporters that the country needs to address a ‘militant terrorist situation’ that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.” She claimed that Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas, were somehow operating under Sharia law. While the former “has a thriving Muslim community,” the latter no longer even exists, having been “annexed into Dallas around 1975.”

7-10. Christine O’Donnell, Carl Paladino, Dan Maes, & Alan West – This quartet of candidates for political office seems to think they’re something they’re not, namely “secret agents.” As initially reported by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and then by The Raw Story, these four horsemen of the apocalypse all “claimed to have received classified information or have special roles in law enforcement,” although “there is little or no evidence to back up the candidates’ claims.” Perhaps the evidence was destroyed by Obama and his fellow Nazi Muslim socialist extremists.

Happy World Mental Health Day!

Battered Nation

Posted on by David Jaffe

He was passionate and charming, a God-fearing man sustained by the strength of his convictions and the force of his personality. He did not hesitate to speak his mind and did so bluntly and plainly. He conveyed power, self-assurance, and a rugged masculinity. When she was with him, he made her feel protected and watched over. She fell for him hard.

They were together for 8 years. At first, he seemed to treat her well. Though not a generous man by nature, he occasionally managed to bestow modest gifts upon her, about which he made a great fuss. Over time, he became less giving and less attentive. He seemed to take her for granted. He began to ignore and minimize her needs, thinking only of himself and his cronies. He became secretive and deceitful. He spied on her. He spent unwisely and took money from her. He burned through their savings and amassed a mountain of debt. He behaved rashly, even picking fights with strangers. When she brought up his behavior, he angrily questioned her love and intimated that she was unfaithful. He told her that no one would care for her if he left.

Despite everything, she stayed with him. She looked the other way or made excuses for his behavior. She rationalized that he could not help himself, that he was just naturally intense and passionate. She felt like she needed him. So she stuck it out, busying herself with work and taking refuge in the creature comforts of eating and shopping—and in the illusion that everything was all right.

More years passed, and then something shifted. His hold over her waned, and she managed to gain her independence. She even started to see someone else, who seemed more kindly and sensitive to her needs. But she remained burdened by the legacy of her prior relationship. She was haunted by crushing debt and painful memories that defied escape. She despaired, and her new relationship suffered. He could not rescue her, and she faulted him for this inability and his matter-of-fact demeanor.

When her old beau began to woo her back, pledging that things would be different, she found herself oddly tempted.

Laboring for Health

Posted on by David Jaffe

Since it’s Labor Day, it seems only fitting to share a news item relevant to those who truly know what it is like to endure labor, mothers. The article, which is a couple of weeks old (making it ancient in the Information Age), concerns a potential link between prenatal exposure to pesticides and the future development of attention deficit disorders. That such a link may exist is not entirely surprising. But it is alarming nonetheless. We live amid a multitude of toxins, which individually and in combination may impact the most vulnerable among us in ways that we cannot always imagine or appreciate. At least, not until the body of scientific data and the resulting public uproar become too powerful to ignore. In the meantime, it pays to be attentive and cautious.

From U.S. News & World Report:

Pesticide Exposure in the Womb Increases ADHD Risk

Exposure to pesticides while in the womb may increase the odds that a child will have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health. Combine that with research published in May in Pediatrics finding that children exposed to pesticides were more likely to have ADHD, and it’s enough to make parents wonder how to reduce their family’s exposure to pesticides.

The California researchers are studying the impact of environmental exposures on the health of women and children who live in the Salinas Valley, an agricultural region with heavy pesticide use. They tested the urine of pregnant women for pesticide residue, and then tested the behavior of their children at ages 3½ and 5. The 5-year-olds who had been exposed to organophosphate pesticides while in the womb had more problems with attention and behavior than did children who were not exposed. What’s more, the heavier the pesticide exposure, the more likely that the child would have symptoms of ADHD . The results were published online in Environmental Health Perspectives.

This isn’t proof that pesticides cause ADHD, but since organophosphate pesticides are neurotoxins that kill pests by disrupting neurotransmitters that carry signals though the brain, it’s easy to imagine that exposure to organophosphate might interfere with brain function and development. [full article]

Mood Swings

Posted on by David Jaffe

The psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” This metaphor aptly describes the mindset that has plagued the field of psychiatry over the past couple of decades, particularly when it comes to treating children with severe forms of emotional and behavioral disturbance. The consequence of this one-tool-fits-all mentality has been an epidemic of Bipolar Disorder diagnoses and off-label prescribing of powerful anti-psychotic medications, which has often done more harm than good. Disturbingly, these trends persist—although there are signs that the pendulum may finally be swinging the other way, as reported by the New York Times:

A Child’s Ordeal Shows Risks Of Psychosis Drugs for Young

OPELOUSAS, La. — At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums.

Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3.

He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her “wit’s end” when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality. “All I had was a medicated little boy,” Ms. Warren said. “I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.”

Today, 6-year-old Kyle is in his fourth week of first grade, scoring high marks on his first tests. He is rambunctious and much thinner. Weaned off the drugs through a program affiliated with Tulane University that is aimed at helping low-income families whose children have mental health problems, Kyle now laughs easily and teases his family.

Ms. Warren and Kyle’s new doctors point to his remarkable progress — and a more common diagnosis for children of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder — as proof that he should have never been prescribed such powerful drugs in the first place.

Kyle now takes one drug, Vyvanse, for his attention deficit. His mother shared his medical records to help document a public glimpse into a trend that some psychiatric experts say they are finding increasingly worrisome: ready prescription-writing by doctors of more potent drugs to treat extremely young children, even infants, whose conditions rarely require such measures.

More than 500,000 children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, according to a September 2009 report by the Food and Drug Administration. Their use is growing not only among older teenagers, when schizophrenia is believed to emerge, but also among tens of thousands of preschoolers.

A Columbia University study recently found a doubling of the rate of prescribing antipsychotic drugs for privately insured 2- to 5-year-olds from 2000 to 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment, violating practice standards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

“There are too many children getting on too many of these drugs too soon,” Dr. Mark Olfson, professor of clinical psychiatry and lead researcher in the government-financed study, said. [full article]

Sixth National Clinical Cannabis Conference in Warwick RI

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

I am attending this conference as a way to educate myself as a mental health practitioner, looking to understand more of the science behind the uses of cannabis. The conference agenda is as follows:

Agenda – Sixth National Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics
Thursday April 15, 2010

7 PM – Reception & Exhibits

Friday, April 16, 2010

7:30 – Registration and Continental Breakfast

8:00 – Al Byrne – Welcome/Opening Remarks – Donald Abrams, MD (UCSF), Jesse Stout (RIPAC) and Donna Policastro, RN (RISNA)

8:30 – Raphael Mechoulam, PhD – Cannabis:Opening New Vistas in Both Therapy and Chemical Biology

9:10 – John McPartland, DO – A Molecular View of the Synergistic Shotgun

9:35 – Robert Melamede PhD – Endogenous Cannabinoid System Review

10:00 Break

10:20 – Gregory L. Gerdeman, PhD – Cannabinoids and the Neurobiology of Reward, Habit Formation and Addiction

10:45 – Andrea Hohmann, PhD – Endocannabinoid System & Neuropathic Pain

11:10 – Heather Bradshaw, PhD – The Endogenous Cannabinoid System and Reproductive Pain

11:35 – Mark Ware, MD, MSc, MRCP – Safety of Medical Cannabis Use

12:00 Lunch: Steve DeAngelo – First Look: An Analytical Window into California’s Medical Cannabis Supply

1:30 – Ed Glick – Growing Cannabis for Medicine

1:50 – Lyle Craker, PhD – Chasing the Rainbow- Medical Cannabis and the Struggle to Break the NIDA Monopoly

2:10 – David Bearman, MD – American Academy of Cannabinoid Medicine

2:30 Break

2:50 – Philippe Lucas – It Can’t Hurt to Ask: A Patient Survey of Canadian Medical Cannabis Users

3:10 – Jennifer Burbank – Oral Preparations

3:30 – Charles Alexandre, RN & Todd Handel, MD (RI) – Steve Jenison, MD & Bryan Krumm, RN, CNP (NM) – State Programs and Supplying Patients with Medicinal Cannabis

4:10 – Sunil Aggarwal, MD, PhD Candidate – Geographic Snapshots of Medical Cannabis Access and Delivery in Washington State

4:30 End of day

6:00-10:00 – Benefit Dinner- Dr. Weil Presentation – Silent and Live Auction – Reggae Band – Comedy

7:00 PM – Andrew Weil, MD – Live Video Lecture – Alternative Medicine

Saturday, April 17, 2010

7:30 Registration

8:00 Al Byrne – Welcome – Melanie Dreher, RN, PhD

8:20 – Raphael Mechoulam, PhD – Head Trauma, Osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s Disease – An Unexpected Trio

9:00 – Reinaldo Takahashi, PhD – Cannabinoids and Aversive Memories in Animals: Novel Perspectives in the Treatment of PTS(d)

9:30 – Denis Petro, MD – Cannabis in the Treatment of Eye Movement Disorders, Congenital and Pendular Nystagmus

10:00 Break

10:20 – Richard Musty, PhD – Cognitive and Psychomotor Effects of Cannabis

10:50 – Michael Krawitz and Al Byrne – Veterans and Pain, PTS(d) Syndrome, Traumatic Brain Injuries

11:20 – Jose Crippa,MD, PhD – Cannabidiol for the Treatment of Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Past, Present and Future

12:00 Lunch: Amanda Reiman, PhD, MSW – The Patient as Informed Consumer: Moving Beyond Safe Access

1:30 – Jay Rostow (VA) & Rhonda O’Donnell (RI) – Cannabis for Muscle Spasms and MS

2:00 – Donald Abrams, MD – Cannabinoid:Opioid Interactions

2:30 – Jane Metrik, PhD – Variability in Marijuana’s Acute Effects: The Role of Expectancies, Pharmacology and Genetics

3:00 – Break

3:20 – Mary Lynn Mathre, RN – Harm Reduction and Cannabis

3:45 – Faculty in Attendance Q & A, Mathre-Moderator

4:30 End of Conference

National Survivors of Suicide Day

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

It’s worth mentioning that today is National Survivors of Suicide Day:

National Survivors of Suicide Day is a day of healing for those who have lost someone to suicide. It was created by U.S. Senate resolution in 1999 through the efforts of Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, who lost his father to suicide. Every year, AFSP sponsors an event to provide an opportunity for the survivor community to come together for support, healing, information and empowerment.

May those who have suffered this kind of loss find peace and new joy — and may this day help us to learn more about how to prevent suicide. More information about National Survivors of Suicide Day can be found at the American Foundation for the Prevention of Suicide.

Ehrenreich Argues for Better Thinking, Not Positive Thinking

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

I will definitely need to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s newest book. Not only is she one of my favorite political writers, but now she is delving into cultural criticism related to the mental health field’s relentless pursuit of “positive thinking.”

Newsweek’s Julia Baird provides a short review:

[...] In her new book, Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich calls positive thinking a “mass delusion.” She argues that an unrelenting drive to train our brains to overlook problems and blame ourselves for failures has blinded us to inequality, incompetence, and stupidity.

The philosophy of positive thinking, she argues, developed both as a reaction to the negativity of Calvinism and a salve for the sick and anxious, but has, over time, been turned into a kind of blind optimism. At the heart of positive thinking is a belief that you can will anything you like into happening: recovering from cancer, getting a promotion, becoming a millionaire. Often, the worse things are, the more vehemently people are encouraged to be sunny. The more companies downsized and restructured in the ’80s and ’90s, the more popular affirmation-chanting, team-building consultants became. And all the while, as the country’s wealth shot up, the gap between rich and poor ballooned.