Hello BR,
 
I had a chance this past week to twitter in and listen to/watch your interview with Ann Basset on the Vineyard View.   As always, excellent and thought provoking.
 
You said something that has stuck with me and I wonder if you might elaborate?  You said that just recently professionals have ceased referring to ptsd and now use pts or ptss (syndrome) because pts is not a mental health disorder, but rather a neurophysiological condition.
 
Does that mean that pts is no longer considered an anxiety disorder? And will it no longer be part of the DSM?

Investigators from the Coimbra Nursing School in Coimbra, Portugal and the University of Akron’s College of Nursing reported on the efficacy of a guided imagery intervention for decreasing depression, anxiety, and stress and increasing comfort in psychiatric inpatients with depressive disorders.

A quasi-experimental design sampled 60 short-term hospitalized patients suffering from depression, selected consecutively. The experimental group listened to a guided imagery compact disk once a day for 10 days.

Question:  

My father has suffered from dementia since 1999.  He no longer has clarity in his mind and does not recognize me or my brother.   He lives in a special care facility where he gets good care.

The staff recently told me that he was becoming more agitated and sleepless during the night.  As a result, he is extremely tired and confused during the day.

Any suggestions as to what kind of tools might help him, or will nothing reach him at this point?

Thanks.  Arnold 

Our seven-year-old son Sam is a very sweet boy who has had problems with anxiety since pre-school. He now is in second grade with an excellent teacher and many neighborhood friends in his class.  He is also a bright boy - schoolwork has never been a problem for him. In spite of all this, at the beginning of the school year he became very anxious, was reluctant to go to school and started wetting the bed again.

This happened at the beginning of first grade too, lasting for many months. This year, my social worker sister predicted this was likely to happen again and coached us to become proactive. She recommended we keep tools on hand from your website to help Sam.  

We used two CDs  – Sleep Fairy right before bedtime and Magic Island in the morning before school – sometimes with breakfast in bed!  He enjoyed listening to them immediately.

Question:

Hi, Belleruth.  I'm a psychotherapist, and I have quite a few of your guided imagery CD's that I use with my patients.  But this question is personal... my 7 year old daughter has had stomach aches for years.  We've had tests run from time to time, but all is well physically.

I would like to buy her a CD from your website to help her with her stomach aches. Most of the ones for kids seem to focus on relaxation. Perhaps that would be enough.  I'm wondering which CD you would recommend for her.

Rosalynne

Well, as you might imagine, since the Fort Hood shootings, the phones have been ringing off the hook and emails have been pouring in.  People want to know why the Dept. of Defense and the V.A. aren’t using portable, digitized guided imagery in a more systematic way to combat PTSD in our troops, given the research results we’ve been seeing with it.

It’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll just start with some random thoughts. Hopefully they’ll come across as sequential.

My 41 year old daughter is a successful research scientist who took her time finding the right man to marry.  Four years ago, she finally found him. They married a few months later and immediately tried to start a family.  She could not get pregnant, in spite of the fact that there were no hindrances detected clinically in either one of them.  

Sarah is a bit high strung to start with, but this situation created great levels of stress in her and for them as a couple.  It was heartbreaking to watch my lovely daughter, who had so much of her life together at last, become a tense, distracted, unhappy person.  She has always been a high-energy, productive, happy person.

Researchers from the University of Louisville in Kentucky looked at whether Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) can reduce stress arousal in patients suffering from fibromyalgia.

An earlier study by this principal investigator showed that MBSR reduced depressive symptoms in patients with fibromyalgia with gains maintained at two months follow-up (Sephton et al., Arthritis & Rheumatism, 57:77-85, 2007).

This second study explored the effects of MBSR on basal sympathetic (SNS) activation among women with fibromyalgia. Twenty-four participants were tested before and after MBSR for anxiety, depressive symptoms, and SNS activation.

Researchers from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles conducted a 4-week pilot study to determine whether Interactive Guided Imagery could be effective for stress reduction (and therefore reduce the metabolic disease risk associated with obesity and hypercortisolism) in overweight Latino adolescents.