THE REVOLUTIONARY ART OF SELF LOVE

FEELING REBLOGGY
WEBINAR HOST: NYDIA DAUPHINE
      From YMCA CANADA, FACEBOOK

(She alternates between speaking English and French)

Awesomely Luvvie: Self-Care is Mind Care

Feeling Rebloggy
This week has been rough. Two wealthy people, who seemed to have the world at their feet, pursued their dreams and were living their best lives, decided to take their own lives. Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain took their own lives, 3 days apart, rocking our world. I’m especially stunned about Bourdain....

Honestly, the biggest takeaway for me is that what is the point of success if we aren’t happy or whole?

I started going to therapy last year, because I realize that I was excelling at work and nothing else. My toolbox was sparse and I wanted to make sure I was putting as much effort into my well-being as I was putting into my business’ well-being.

Every week or every other week, I spend one hour in therapy.

I go to therapy to stay happy and whole.

I go to talk through random things with an objective 3rd party.

I go to therapy to make sure whatever baggage I have isn’t being carried into every room and every conversation I’m in.

I go to therapy because self-care is mind care.

EMOTIONAL HEALTH / MENTAL HEALTH
RESOURCES AT THE LINK

https://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2018/06/wholeness-sending-love-resources.html

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

RUNNER IDA KEELING WINS AT 100 YEARS OLD

Feeling Rebloggy

At the 2016 Penn Relays, Ida Keeling ran the 100-meter dash in 1 minute and 17.33 seconds to set the world record for women age 100 to 104—then dropped to the track to do pushups as the crowd roared. 

In her new book, Can’t Nothing Bring Me Down, Keeling, now 102, talks about thrilling moments like this, but also her struggles: growing up poor in Harlem, working in factories during the Great Depression to raise four kids as a single mother, and losing two adult sons to unsolved cases of drug-related violence.

This last one sank Keeling into a depression at age 67. So her daughter Shelley, a track-and-field and cross-country coach, took Keeling to a local 5K. Miss Ida, as she’s known, felt clumsy at first, but ultimately uplifted. “The good part was that the sad part left,” she says. “Running to me is like medicine.”

~RUNNERS WORLD

Read More:https://www.runnersworld.com/human-race/102-year-old-track-star

Dark Skinned Women, Vitamin D Deficiency, and Depression

feeling rebloggy

The researchers reported that many of the young women had vitamin D levels that were below what is considered sufficient for good health. 

All told, 61 percent of the women of color participating had low levels of D, compared to 35 percent of the white women in the study. All the women’s vitamin D levels varied with the time of the year and, as expected, were lowest in winter, rose in the spring and declined in the fall. More than a third of the participants reported clinically significant symptoms of depression each week for the duration of the study.

The lower the women’s levels of vitamin D, the more likely they were to have clinically significant symptoms of depression over the course of the five-week study, even after the investigators accounted for other possible contributing factors, such as time of year, the amount of exercise the women performed and the amount of time they spent outdoors. 

Even so, the researchers said that their findings don’t conclusively show that low vitamin D levels were the cause of depression in their subjects. The next step would be a clinical trial to see whether vitamin D supplements can help prevent or relieve depression.

Read More: 

https://www.drweil.com/health-wellness/body-mind-spirit/mental-health/can-low-vitamin-d-levels-cause-depression/

TO ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE WITHOUT TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS IS TO RISK DEPRESSION

"Optimism over uncontrollable negative events 

is more useful than 

optimism over controllable negative events."

Let that sink in for a moment before you read on.

FEELING REBLOGGY

Dr. Markman writes:

• The authors of the paper first review evidence on uncontrollable events, and suggest that there is good reason to think that having a positive attitude toward uncontrollable events in the past is a good thing. Classic research by Shelley Taylor, for example, suggests that a patient with breast cancer will adjust better and suffer fewer symptoms of depression by being optimistic rather than by being pessimistic about her disease ...

• People who thought positively about (controllable) severe negative events, though, actually showed an increase in symptoms of depression over time. The reason for this increase is that these negative events were controllable. By minimizing the importance of a (negative event), people opened themselves up to experience more of it in the future ... You cannot find ways to eliminate the negative in life if you always accentuate the positive.

Optimism over uncontrollable negative events is more useful than optimism over controllable negative events.  

~Huff Post

Read More: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-bishop/would-you-rather-live-in-_b_948449.html

SUICIDE RATE RISING AMONG BLACK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

Feeling Rebloggy
From 2015

Black people have often fared poorly in their interactions with the mental health care system. For example, they are nearly half as likely as whites to receive treatment for diagnosed mental health disorders of comparable severity. When black patients do receive treatment, it is far more likely to occur in an emergency room or psychiatric hospital than it is for whites, and less likely to be in the calmer office-based setting, where longer-term treatment can take place.

It’s difficult to say for certain why more black children are committing suicide, but researchers identified exposure to violence and traumatic stress among black children, as well as aggressive school discipline and a higher likelihood of early onset puberty, as possible risk factors...

The trends in the study were driven by boys. Across all age groups, women are less likely to die by suicide, even though suicide attempts are three times higher among women than men.

~HuffPost

Read Morehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/20/increased-suicide-among-black-children_n_7313720.html

CURRENT PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS MAY NOT BE VALID AFRICAN AMERICANS

After spending twelve months in a disadvantaged predominantly Black neighborhood in the Midwest to understand how African Americans perceive depression, Alang suggests that clinicians and researchers should be asking if the instruments they use to diagnose and assess depression are really valid among African Americans....

In the study, Alang suggests that African Americans perceive depression as a weakness inconsistent with notions of strength in the community, rather than as a health condition.  

This is what I meant when I said "Black people think a psychologist is for white women who burnt the pot roast three nights in a row, then had a nervous breakdown because her husband frowned at her"

The study results have significant implications for the clinical assessment of depression and for the measurement of depression in community surveys.

Read More: 
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160622105804.htm 

I have always suspected that white psychologists are ill equipped to help black people in mental distress. Always. Most black people probably have. This is why I think a black person should make an effort to see a black psychologist in times of trouble since, I assume, a reasonably intelligent black psychologist would try to adjust his diagnostic tools based on his or her own black experience.

But we need American science publications (white dominated) to catch up to reality sooner rather than later.  Black people need to be able to get mental health care anywhere and and from anyone, not just from a sliver of our own 13%, the ones who happen to choose psychology or psychiatry as a profession.