May is Mental Health Awareness Month and we are continuing our theme of providing education and resources for anyone who is impacted. Which is a lot of us considering recent data suggests that over 50% of Americans will experience mental health problems at some point in their lifetime. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Youth depression rates have doubled since 2012. And mental illness affects people of any age, race, sex, religion, or income.
Stress Awareness Month has been recognized every April since 1992, and this year it seems particularly relevant to highlight.
The term stress is used to describe many different emotional and physical responses including agitation, anger, anxiety, worry, fear and depression. Understanding stress, its impact, and developing ways to cope is a pivotal part of the work psychologists do in therapy with their patients.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that was developed in the late 1990s by Dr. Marsha Linehan with the goal of treating Borderline Personality Disorder (BDP). Since that time, DBT has been found to successfully treat many different mental health problems, especially those that involve a difficulty regulating emotions such as ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, Eating Disorders, Major Depression, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
The main goals of DBT are to teach people how to live in the moment, regulate their emotions, develop and maintain healthy relationships, and cope with distress. Because the goals are universally valuable, DBT skills have been well-established in the therapy community as a set of useful tools to develop no matter what brings a patient into treatment.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The main goals of DBT are to teach people how to live in the moment, regulate their emotions, develop and maintain healthy relationships, and cope with distress. You might remember back in June when we wrote about a communication strategy called DEAR MAN. This is a DBT strategy aimed at helping people set boundaries and ask for what they need in a healthy and balanced way.
By Melanie Brown, PhD
In a world where we are bombarded by messages about eating “clean” and “healthy,” it is often hard to make sense of what is actually healthy and good for your body and that of your child. Large food groups have been demonized as unhealthy, when in fact, there is little scientific evidence to support many of the latest food trends. Taken to an extreme, eating clean can lead to malnutrition and illness – the opposite of health.
Particularly concerning is that these messages about “eating clean” can be misinterpreted by young people, especially in the context of cultural pressure to achieve an unrealistically thin and toned body. Instagram posts of celebrities with impossibly toned “beach bods” incite social comparison in many teens who then strive for “six pack abs” and “thigh gap.”