Hello, Everyone.

Reading that line, “How wonderful to be free at last from smoking!” in this week’s Inspiring Story, brought me back to my own monster addiction to cigarettes 40 years ago.

I used to smoke two and a half packs of unfiltered Camels a day.  I wasn’t enjoying them, beyond the first smoke of the day with my first cup of coffee – the other 49 cigarettes were unsatisfying – just something I did to maintain comfort.  In other words, I was an addict.

Horrid to think of it now, but each psychotherapy session (55 minutes) that I conducted in my tiny, windowless, completely enclosed cubicle of an office at the Charles F. Read Zone Center in northwest Chicago was a three cigarette affair. And that was just me. Sometimes my client smoked too. Can you imagine??  There I was, poisoning the lungs of the people I was presumably “healing”.  

All of us at Health Journeys want to wish you all a very happy, healthy, fun, productive, joy-filled and loving New Year!!

All best,
Belleruth, George, Cindy, Cheryl, Rich, Elizabeth, Walter, Mary, Steve, Bruce, Nancy, Reed and David

Season’s Greetings, everyone!

All of us at Health Journeys are wishing you a joyous and stress-free holiday season – or at least as much as is realistically attainable!  (How’s that for assuming nothing?) And that includes our hopes for a new year that’s filled with joy, love, creativity, health and many satisfying new adventures.  

My own new year’s resolutions are as follows (writing this down and making it public might be just the right move to seal my intention and my fate!:

Hello again.
Once more it's that time of year when we aspire to stay calm, sane and steady, in the face of demands piling on as the holidays draw nigh. I know you've probably seen most of these tips before, but just for a reminder, here's my list of how to reduce stress…

• Take Care of Your Body
  Try to do all those things you know are good for your physical well being: get regular exercise; take it easy on the caffeine, sugar and alcohol; get enough sleep; eat healthy food - you know this stuff. This is the baseline of stress reduction.


• Track Your Physical Comfort
  Take time to check in and see how your body is feeling. Once you notice, you can make small corrections to relieve discomfort before it takes over. Breathe into tight places; stretch and move when your back or neck feels stiff; look out the window when your eyes are straining at the computer screen; massage your neck and press the acupoints when a headache is lurking. But you have to notice what’s amiss first.

Hello, All.

Well, for days I was finding random Cheerios and Legos in my bed, ever since the Great Thanksgiving Squeezer Invasion of 2009.  They’re sweet reminders of my four rambunctious grandsons (and their parents too – don’t get me wrong!), ages five, five, three and two years old.  I miss them, but after a steady diet of Curious George and Word Girl (excellent content, but, frankly, just an excuse to snuggle), I confess to being eager for a little adult fiction and a smattering of world news.

Looking forward to presenting some new info in a keynote on new methods used by the military at NICABM this week – the great annual Hilton Head conference for cutting edge clinical applications.  This year, there will be a lot of info and expertise on the neuroplasticity of the brain and inflammation – two very hot topics these days, where a lot of exciting new data is pouring in.  So I’m guessing I’ll see many of you there.

Recently the Department of Defense (DoD) made a bold decision to introduce Positive Psychology to all active military in hopes of reducing the incidence of PTSD. I appreciate the boldness, but question the choice of method.

Positive Psychology provides an antidote to the more traditional, symptom-focused, disability-obsessed aspects of standard psychotherapy, and instead examines and promotes authenticity, productivity, the appreciation of beauty, creativity, forgiveness, altruism, gratitude and connection with community.

Indeed, building upon a person’s strengths is a key tenet of my profession - social work - and always has been.  I’m all for this fruitful legacy of the late, great Abe Maslow (the psychologist who put terms like “self-actualizing”, “peak experience” and “human potential movement” into common parlance).

I've no doubt positive psychology has been good for a host of people, most notably middle school kids and teenagers suffering from iffy self-esteem, adolescent angst and hormonal doldrums.  It’s also been shown to reduce depression in self-selected, online subjects.  But I just can’t see how it can make a dent on posttraumatic stress, especially the soul-killing kind that comes from the unique horrors of combat.

Well, folks, after getting much more information, I've changed my tune and my focus slightly.  I've switched my would-be, long distance (and therefore limited) diagnosis of the Fort Hood shooter.  And, having become alarmed at the way the media has made this event about how people with PTSD are dangerous powder kegs, spring-loaded to go murderously ballistic at the drop of a hat, I felt compelled to refute this notion on my Huffington Post blog,  here.

Please feel free to comment, argue, agree, rant or opine. The more posts the better.  You need to sign up for Huffpo first, but it's no big deal - just give yourself a username and password and you're in. I'm finding it to be a terrific place to impose my opinions upon the unsuspecting nation.  Thanks for your help with this.

For those of you who want to see how a flu virus gets into your system, becomes all fruitful and multiplies by the millions, and how your amazing immune system responds, there’s a terrific cartoon video on NPR’s website that shows how this occurs at the cellular level.  You can find it here. 

This piece also explains why, after an invading virus replicates by the millions within seconds, we don’t just keel over and drop dead in about a minute.  This is the explanation to focus on if you’re interested in creating your own guided imagery to counter this flu-catching process.

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.

This week’s featured research is about the effectiveness of treating depression with short-term, web-based, clinician-assisted cognitive behavioral treatment.  It’s no surprise that this study is one of many that comes out of Australia, where there’s a special need for this sort of thing, because of a scarcity of trained therapists, long wait lists, reluctance to go to a therapist and significant distances from medical help in some parts of the country.  

One such CBT program, (also developed in Australia), is something called the Mood Gym. It’s a free, modular-based program developed by the Centre for Mental Health Research at the Australian National University.  It gets high marks and decent respect for being well designed and fairly effective for many with mild or moderate depression, although nobody claims it to be a substitute for medical treatment, or a panacea for severe depression.

Hello, again.
I remember from my 33 years of clinical practice that it’s right around now that the light starts to change and seasonal depression sets in.  Starting around Halloween, therapists become overbooked, their schedules bursting at the seams with new appointments and people coming back for a “tune-up”, not feeling so hot all of a sudden.

So, this might be a good time to run some tips by you for dealing with depression during this vulnerable time for so many.  And let me just say at the outset that I really do understand that depression, by definition, drains your energy, motivation and sense of hope and efficacy, so you’re not exactly in the mood to follow tips. I get that. Try to do a little of this and that anyway.  If you keep at it, the gains can become cumulative and effective over time.  Okay, here goes: