Ramanisblog

Tag: trauma

  • Self Injury-Cases and Causes.

    Lack of Family warmth is the primary reason.

    Gregariousness and communicating with others is one of the Basic Instincts of man  along with Instincts  of

    Survival

    Thirst

    Hunger

    Sex.

    When clash of instincts takes place, the outlet is provided by Gregariousness.

    If  the process of sharing Conflict is thwarted,many abnormal behavior is noticed.

    Individual craves for attention , not for the act per se, but sends out a message that ‘I am in trouble,I want to share’

    Family and friends perform that function.

    With skewed up values on Familial System, the problem becomes serious in acts like these.

    People need to be brought up in an emotionally secure environment:they need to interact with people;children should play , not with Computer and Gadgets but with children of their Age Group.

    More importantly they should have a mooring in some Faith;it could be Atheism as well.

    Setting impossible targets for the individual and too much of planning in Life are also contributing factors.

    They should be taught that losing is a part of Life  and none can get all they desire.

     

    When Canadian researchers plugged the terms “self-injury” and “self-harm” into YouTube‘s search engine, 5,000 videos popped up. They selected the 100 most-viewed videos. Wonder who in the world would watch explicit images of someone hurting herself?

    Apparently lots of people. Viewers clicked on the videos in question more than 2 million times and designated them as a “favorite” more than 12,000 times. (More on Time.com: Gallery: Self-Injury in Japan)

    Up to a quarter of teens and young adults intentionally hurt themselves by self-cutting or burning; the medical term for such behavior is nonsuicidal self-injury, or NSSI, which refers to intentionally injuring oneself with no intention of committing suicide.

    Many of the videos chronicle personal timelines — “I started self-injuring when I was 14,” a video might begin — while others present statistics about NSSI. The information conveyed in the videos was pretty evenly split between the factual or educational and hopeless stories of woe. Nearly all the videos contained images of self-injury; 28% of the videos that featured a person actually included in-action footage. More than half the videos contained no warning about graphic, violent content. (More on Time.com: How to Find the Best Drug Treatment for Teens: A Guide for Parents)
    ..YouTube contacted the researchers and requested the URLs of the videos they’d studied; the website has since flagged many of the videos for mature content and removed others.  But even if all 100 were taken down — and not all 100 were — what about the other 49,900?

    Q: Why do people intentionally hurt themselves?

    A: People self-injure in order to cope with difficult emotional experiences — lots of sadness, stress, anxiety. Usually self-injury is a marker or sign that something is not going very well for a young person.

    Q: How does it help them cope?

    A: A lot of people do report it provides temporary relief from negative emotions. But what happens is it becomes repetitive, and it’s used as a negative coping strategy.

    Q: Do girls engage in self-injury more than boys?

    A: It was previously believed that by far more females self-injured than males. However, more recent research suggests that males self-injure as well, and many studies report no sex differences in rates of self-injury.

    Q: It’s called NSSI — non-suicidal self-injury. People who self-injure don’t want to kill themselves?

    A: Based on research, we can distinguish self-injury from suicide. It’s about the intent behind the act itself. Many people are adamant this is not about suicide. It’s about dealing or coping with negative emotions.

    Q: Are people who self-injure just seeking attention?

    A: It’s a myth that it’s about getting attention because many young people don’t want to tell anyone about it.

    Q: What might treatment involve?

    A: We try to foster more adaptive coping strategies for when those negative emotions arise — different types of distraction techniques, physical exercise or just talking to someone when the urge arises. It’s important to help a young person identify what triggers the urge to self-injure.

    http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/23/self-mutilation-videos-on-youtube-may-cause-kids-to-hurt-themselves/#ixzz1FS9qJY2J

    http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1809157,00.html

    Related:

     

    Self-injury (SI) is any deliberate, non-suicidal behavior that inflicts physical harm on one’s body to relieve emotional distress.
    Self-injury does not involve a conscious intent to commit suicide, though many believe that people who harm themselves are suicidal.
    People who SI are often trying to:
    * Distract emotional pain
    * End feelings of numbness
    * Calm overwhelming feelings
    * Maintaining control
    * Self-punish
    * Express thoughts that cannot be put into words
    * Express feelings for which there are no words
    Who engages in self-injury?
    There is no simple portrait of a person who intentionally self-injures. This behavior is not limited by gender, race, education, age, sexual orientation, socio-economics, or religion. However, there are some commonly seen factors:
    * Self-injury more commonly occurs in adolescent females.
    * Many self-injurers have a history of physical, emotional or sexual abuse.
    * Many self-injurers have co-existing problems of substance abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder or eating disorders.
    * Self-injures tend to have been raised in families that discouraged expression of anger, and tend to lack skills to express their emotions.
    * Self-injurers often lack a good social support network.
    What are the types of self-injury?
    * Cutting
    * Burning
    * Picking at skin
    * Interfereing with wound healing
    * Hitting
    * Scratching
    * Pinching
    * Biting
    * Head-banging
    Treatment
    Self-injury is often misunderstood. Self-injurers trying to seek medical or mental health treatment frequently report being treated badly by emergency room doctors and nurses, counselors, police officers and even mental health professionals.

     

     

  • Lessons for and from the mom

    Laudable effort.
    Finally it comes to the question of emotional support of parents and others(other than your parents)
    Instead of assembling friends and people who are not related to you, how about taking into confidence your own and spouses parents and brothers and sisters?
    Emotional cushion for all is provided by joint family system.Though it has its faults , its utility outweighs its negatives.
    Story:
    NEW YORK (CNN) — Would you tell us about the first time Bruce told you about his Council of Dads?

    I instantly thought of the girls, and that this would be a wonderful way for them to get to know different sides of their father.

    I also thought the process of creating the council would give Bruce something else to focus on besides the daily battle against his illness. And the moment he said the words “Council of Dads,” the force of the idea struck me. Bruce, at one of his weakest moments, had come up with a truly powerful concept, one that had the potential to inspire a lot of people beyond our family. I felt compelled to help give life to this idea.

    Can you describe for us how Bruce selected the men who would be in his Council of Dads? Did you play a role?
    …Saying the ‘right thing’ matters far less than the simple act of reaching out. The point is being present.
    –Linda Rottenberg

    Bruce jokes that after he asked my opinion about who should be in the Council of Dads, I instantly started vetoing some of his candidates. Some of the men we knew instantly would be in the council. They would represent key aspects of Bruce’s character — TravelDad, ValuesDad, ThinkDad, DreamDad.

    I really wanted someone from his hometown of Savannah [Georgia] both because being from the South is so important to him and because I wanted someone who knew Bruce growing up. But I also felt strongly that there was one side of Bruce that was missing — the side that views the world differently, that appreciates beauty as well as pain, and that cannot suppress the urge to topple authority. That’s how “RebellionDad” snuck into The Council of Dads! I love the mix we ended up with.

    What did you learn about fatherhood and men from watching Bruce work on The Council of Dads?

    I feel like I got a window into male intimacy and male friendship. On the one hand, there certainly was a fair bit of jousting, one-upmanship, teasing about bald spots and conversations about sports cars. On the other hand, many of the conversations Bruce had with the dads surprised me for their emotional content. The men discussed their feelings, the emotional well-being of their children, and the challenge of juggling marriage, parenting and work.

    Listening to Bruce and his Council of Dads often felt like being at preschool drop-off with all the moms! In fact, all my girlfriends went to buy the book just so they could learn the secrets of their husbands. And now they’re saying to the men in their lives, “Go get you one of those Councils of Dads!”

    Have you considered starting your own Council of Moms?

    Yes. In fact Eden and Tybee asked the other day, “Daddy has a Council of Dads. Can you make a Council of Moms for us?” I’ve already decided on a few members, but I’m still working through what I call “Council Sudoku”: Finding the right balance of women to represent different sides of my personality and different eras of my life while also giving them unique roles to play in the girls’ lives reminds me of a puzzle grid where you keep fiddling until you finally land on a combination that works.

    And like Sudoku, which is a 3×3 grid, I’m inclined to have nine members rather than Bruce’s six (Women are multifaceted and need more council members, I’ve decided!) But what I learned from watching Bruce is that you can’t simply e-mail invitations. I joked that he planned six marriage proposals. You have to make a moment.
    http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/06/08/dads.linda.qa/index.html

  • Most Expensive Diseases.


    The list of the 10 most expensive diseases comprises estimates calculated by Charles Roehrig, health economist at the Altarum Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan, based on 2005 data. Previous government surveys included community-dwelling patients using data from the federal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Roehrig’s estimate, however, provides a fuller picture by also accounting for costs of treating patients in nursing homes, the military, prisons and mental hospitals.
    http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/14/most-expensive-diseases-lifestyle-health-costs-treatments_slide.html

  • America the Traumatized: How 13 Events of the Decade Made Us the PTSD Nation

    The Millennial Decade screwed with our heads and destroyed our national identity. Are we in for a cataclysmic century?

    It’s been one helluva decade, even though we’ve reached the end without knowing what to call it. Some have tried “the aughts,” others the “double-Os.” I’m content to simply call it over. To mark its location in the great march of history, I’ve taken to calling it the millennial decade, after the great numerological transition it heralded. Yet for describing its character, nothing comes closer than the Decade of Trauma — American trauma, that is.

    Here in the home of the brave, we’ve endured a decade that shattered nearly every notion of what it meant to be an American, whether you live on the left or the right. And so we shout. Or hide. Or startle too easily.

    In America today, it seems we all have a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder, as evidenced by our increasingly vitriolic political environment, where reality is denied and histrionics run riot. Anger, we’re told, is the natural reaction to trauma; in people with PTSD, the anger is out of control. By that measure, the millennial decade has brought us 10 years of PTSD politics — with no end in sight.

    From the Tea Party madness, the unwillingness of Republicans in Congress to vote for any piece of legislation drafted by Democrats, the misuse of the filibuster in the Senate to all but break the institution, and the outsized rage on the left toward the Obama administration for simply behaving as politicians do, our national politics have moved beyond the bounds of extreme partisanship into the realm of mental illness.

    This breaking of the national psyche was bound to happen; it’s been decades in the making. American exceptionalism — the idea that we are somehow better and more blessed than any other people on the face of the earth by dint of our own hard work, ingenuity, innate goodness and superior democracy — was bound to fail as our nation, like every other before it, found itself caught in the grinding wheels of history.

    Rooted in denial, the doctrine of American exceptionalism edits out of the American story the sins against humanity that created our nation: the genocide of the people who were here before the Europeans came, and the building of the nation on the backs of involuntary laborers who were tortured, abused and even killed for their trouble. Once you ditch that, it becomes easier to look past the other unpleasant realities of our history, be it our neo-colonialism throughout the world, which helped to build our economy, or the enduring practices of racism and sexism. But denial almost invariably leads to trauma, when on one day, or in one decade, the decay that denial fostered summons home the demons set loose through willful ignorance to do their fright dance before one’s very eyes.
    http://www.alternet.org/story/144791/america_the_traumatized:_how_13_events_of_the_decade_made_us_the_ptsd_nation