Carefully Exposed Depressive Illness

Let’s do a quick recap of Part 1 of this series that is near and dear to my heart – most importantly because children are our future. We must be careful about what messages we expose our children to in a language that they can comprehend.

We will pass away one day and leave the world behind for our children to live in. Let’s make a concentrated effort to leave a world that our children will love to live in and cherish every moment of their lives and remember us with fond memories when we become just a photograph on the wall or a digital image on a computer. We owe it to our children to provide them with the fun-filled childhood that they have a rightful claim to. In this article, let’s consider another common cause of anxiety disorder in children.

Who’s Life Is It Anyway?

It is human nature to see our own reflection in our children. This is almost a reflex action that we adults feel when we have a growing child in our lives. We want the best in our children and want them to be the shining star wherever we live. This is a healthy outlook towards our children, but what’s unfortunate is that often times, we try to impose our own ideals and aspirations in our children. We adults forget that our children have the right to their own identity and must be given the freedom and maturity to choose what they want to do in life.

Instead of counseling them or asking for their opinion, we often try to force them into habits and activities. I have come across many adults who want to see their children achieve what they themselves had always dreamed about but never fulfilled them in their own lives. This may cause severe stress to the child’s psyche when he or she is forced into doing something that they don’t have an ability to do.

We need to understand that not all children have the same abilities that we adults would like them to have. Can abilities be developed? Most certainly you can groom children up to acquire certain abilities, but as adults we need to understand that training is not everything. The DNA and the chemical structure is unique for every person and variations to this chemistry in our body are key factors to what our abilities will ultimately turn out to be. So through training, it is definitely possible to impart the skills, but that does not necessarily mean that the individual will enjoy applying the skills in his or her own life. The point I am trying to make is we adults often forget to recognize the unique qualities of our children and imagine a day when our children will become what we had tried to be and failed. This is inappropriate handling of our responsibilities as parents and child caregivers.

Little do we pause to think that our actions might be creating stress on the child’s mind. If he or she is unable to cope up with what we want and what our expectations are, we often vent our frustration on our children. Even mature adults drop like stones under the influence of depression and anxiety – imagine what happens to the immature mind when she finds a frustrated parent trying to enforce something that is not within her realm of abilities. This sense of failure might not be expressed overtly, but it creates more than a black hole in the child’s psyche – depression sets in. The same depression could lead to anxiety and potential panic attacks in the future. With every future moment of parental frustration due to a non-performing or under-performing child, the black hole continues to widen.

Where do you think the child will be when he or she reaches adulthood? In the dungeons of depression with no self-confidence, with no self-respect and with not firm ground to stand upon to face the challenges of this world.

Parents and child caregivers – pause to think about this for a moment. You’ve had your chances and probably fell short – that is perfectly ok. If everybody became an Einstein or a Michelangelo this world would not have seen most of the brilliant minds that we cherish today. There would have been no Pele, no Mozart, no Mother Teresa and the list goes on.

How do you know that the child that you want to become the engineer that grows up to develop the spaceship that will carry man to Saturn and back over a weekend, is actually a budding Beethoven or a Pele or a Nadia Comaneci even a Florence Nightingale?

A Child’s Right To the Freedom of Choice

So what is the anxiety therapy for children in this situation? It is ok to expose them to what you want them to be and as a parent or a caregiver, that is the right you acquire when you become responsible to bring the child up in this world. But remain sensitive and watch out for signs that indicate rejection. You will know in your heart if your child has the abilities to follow what you want him or her to do or not, so remain in that monitoring mode all the time and pull out if you sense that things are not going to turn out to be what you expected.

Expose the child to everything else that life has to offer in small but generous samples and help the child develop that maturity to choose their path in life. A pros and cons discussion after every sampling goes a million miles to ease the stress in your child’s mind. You are essentially providing practical and rational answers to their favorite “Why?” Be that lifelong educator that holds the child by the hand from the time he or she is born to the time when they have their own children and beyond. Give your child the gift of a childhood that is free from adult-enforced stress – you will be appreciated one day.

The world’s obsession with cleanliness has been identified as a cause of the rising rate of depression, according to scientists.

Scientists have long blamed our sterile environment for increases in asthma and allergies, as some of the bacteria necessary for strengthening the immune system are routinely cleared away, resulting in our bodies over-reacting to dust and pollen, resulting in an allergy.

But recent research has gone one step further; claiming this bodily over-reaction may also impair the brains ability to produce certain chemicals responsible for good mental health, including serotonin, leading to depression. The research is backed up by the fact that rates of depression are far higher in the western world compared to poorer nations as westerner’s immune systems are less trained to deal with bacteria.

Researchers in Atlanta, Georgia have tested this theory by recruiting a group of 27 patients taking drugs to treat Hepatitus C, which causes a similar over reaction in the body. Researchers believe certain reactions cripple the brain’s ability to produce chemicals responsible for mental well being – including the so called ‘happy hormone’, serotonin.

Dr Andrew Miller, a scientist involved in the research, said: “We believe the immune system is causing depression. As people develop and grow up, their immune system develops. If they are exposed to more bacteria and parasites, they are better able to control the inflammation. Nowadays, people’s environments are much cleaner and hygienic so our immune systems never really learn how to deal with infectious agents. We are overactive because our immune system has not been trained.”

The researchers, whose study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, are now testing whether anti-inflammatory drugs could be used to treat depression.

But this method clashes with another research project conducted by Rockefeller University, New York. This separate research suggests anti inflammatory painkillers such as aspirin and Ibuprofen, as well as other painkillers such as paracetamol, could prevent anti depressants such as Prozac from working properly.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRI’s are prescribed to millions every year, many of whom complain these pills are not effective. Rockefeller scientists believe they now know why. The researchers said it was not clear why the pills had this effect, but warned their findings could have ‘profound implications’ for patients.

The US research team gave anti depressants to mice with depression and monitored for behaviour changes. Half the sample of mice were also given painkillers.

Their tests revealed that SSRI’s worked less well when the painkiller was also in the animals’ system. Other types of anti depressants, other than the SSRI’s, were not affected, according to the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.’

The same team found a similar effect in humans, after studying medical records. They report that anti depressants were effective in less than 40% of cases involving patients also taking aspirin-like painkillers, compared to 54% for others.

The researchers also report that the impact on pensioners (seniors, if you’re American) will be particularly severe as depression in this age group also raises the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and if the depression isn’t correctly treated in Alzheimer’s patients, the illness can progress more rapidly.

Electrosensitive people are often misunderstood and judged. Friends just don’t get how electromagnetic exposure can cause really uncomfortable symptoms in someone, if they themselves feel fine around it. And many doctors don’t understand either, because they aren’t aware that electrosensitivity exists.

Electrosensitivity is a Real Disease

But if your whole body starts getting weird whenever you hold your cell phone or walk into a building with Wi-Fi, don’t let anyone label you as “crazy”. You’re not a hypochrondriac. You are electrosensitive.

And you’re not alone. In today’s world you can’t avoid electromagnetic fields (EMFs); and like you, more and more people are suffering from electrosensitivity.

Common Electrosensitive Symptoms

There are lots of different symptoms of electrical sensitivity. You may have a few of these most common ones:

Recurring headaches

Brain fog and memory loss

Sleep and digestive disturbances

Depression, anxiety

Fatigue

Irritation

Where Can You Go if You’re Electrosensitive?

Cell phones and Wi-Fi aren’t the only things electrosensitive people have a hard time with. If you’ve been in high density electromagnetic exposure for a long time, even the electricity and appliances in a room can get to you. Sometimes just getting outside can be such a relief–until you get too close to cell towers or high power lines, that is! Unfortunately, for some electrically-sensitive people, there are few places they can feel at all comfortable in today’s world.

EMF Protection Counteracts EMF Exposure

But take heart-you don’t have to suffer any longer. You don’t even have to give up your wireless toys. You just need EMF protection. But shop carefully for effective EMF protection devices–they’re not all the same. Some companies focus specifically on electrosensitivity, so they understand your condition.

Sometimes you need to get more than one kind of device to protect you from different sources of EMFs. Not all devices protect you completely from all EMFs in your environment, as some companies promise. Read carefully all information given about a product to see what it is designed to do. And make sure the company has a money-back guarantee and they give you enough time to test their products. Read more on electrosensitivity.

Effective EMF Protection

Don’t get discouraged if you actually feel worse when you first try EMF protection devices. Effective products generally cause electrosensitive people to detox at first. This is a good sign–it means they’re working! So be patient. Your symptoms should slowly begin to ease.

No matter how electrosensensitive you are, you don’t have to hide from electromagnetic exposure. With good EMF protection, you can feel good while staying fully involved in today’s world.

Working as a home health aide with mentally ill patients requires a special sensitivity to the needs of the mentally challenged. Too often, people tend to think of the mentally challenged as being somehow inferior and as such, they tend to talk down to them. However, what the mentally ill really need is what anyone else needs – they need someone who will take them seriously and make sure their needs are met while giving them as much freedom as possible.

Just What Is Mental Illness?

Before we can begin to discuss how to work effectively with mentally ill home care patients, it’s important to understand what mental illness actually means. Let’s start with the most basic definition and then go into a more detailed explanation. At its most basic, mental illness means that someone is incapable of functioning independently in society due to some kind of problems with how they experience the world emotionally. Exactly how this manifests itself and what the issues are do require additional explanation however.

Some indicators that a person may be mentally challenged include:

Inability to Develop and Maintain Healthy Relationships – Many mentally ill people find it difficult or impossible to create healthy interpersonal relationships.

Lack of Impulse Control – Another common problem for mentally challenged individuals is a lack of impulse control. Many mentally challenged individuals will for example do things in public or even in private that mentally sound people won’t do (i.e. scream out loud at no one in particular, cause damage, public urination, etc.).

Inability to Tolerate Anxiety and Frustration – We all deal with anxiety and frustration on a daily basis. However, those who are mentally challenged often find that they cannot handle any (or very little) anxiety and or frustration in daily life.

Inability to Respect Others – Finally, many mentally ill people find it difficult to respect others, in terms of private space and or in terms of regular verbal abuse.

It is important to realize that the above list includes things that even mentally healthy individuals experience from time to time. The key difference is that mentally challenged individuals will experience these things on a regular basis and will lack the impulse control to display normal behavior most of the time.

Cause of Mental Illness

Mental illness is a disease and typically a chronic disease just like diabetes, arthritis or RLS. In other words, mental illness is not the fault of the person experiencing it and the mentally challenged should not be made to feel bad for their disability. Some common causes of mental illness include:

Physical Factors – Trauma to the head, either in childhood or adulthood can cause permanent mental illness to occur.

Chemical Imbalance – Many mentally ill individuals have a chemical imbalance in the brain which can sometimes be corrected through the use of medication.

Environmental Factors – Finally, mental illness can be either temporarily or permanently caused by environmental factors. For example, children who are exposed to severe trauma often grow up to be mentally challenged individuals who may experience lifelong problems. Victims of terror attacks or violent crime also sometimes develop either temporary or permanent mental illnesses as a result of their experiences.

Types of Mental Illness

Mental illness typically takes on a number of different forms. These include:

Anxiety – We all experience a certain amount of anxiety in our daily lives. However, those who are mentally challenged may experience severe anxiety which is disproportionate to the problems they happen to be experiencing.

Fears – Similar to anxiety, fears in the mentally ill will include severe, crippling phobias which are not found amongst ordinary people. For example, an ordinary person may be repulsed by the idea of being near an open sewer. However, the individual will have such paranoia from being near the open sewer that he may refuse to leave his home for fear of the possibility of passing by an open sewer.

Depression – Again, while we all feel a normal amount of depression from time to time, someone who is mentally challenged will experience severe depression, often for no reason other than being depressed.

Paranoia – Finally, mentally challenged individuals may experience severe paranoia to the point where they are unable to function in society.

It is important to note that many of your home health care patients dealing with mental illness will be able to recover and lead normal lives, either through therapy or medication and sometimes through a combination of the two. Thus, they may need help only on a temporary basis rather than on a permanent basis.

Your Responsibilities

As a home health care worker with people facing mental challenges, there are a number of things that you need to do in order to ensure the safety and development of your charges. These include:

Record Keeping

You will need to keep careful track of your patient’s emotional states. This means observing changes in behavior and noting what may have precipitated them. You should also note whether or not the change lasts for a long period of time or if it is a short lived change.

Your mentally challenged patients may also experience changes in behavior which are of a positive nature. Thus, it’s important to note when and if such changes occur and to note changes in personality, either for the good or the bad.

While you should note environmental factors surrounding such changes in behavior, it’s important not to draw conclusions on your own as to what precipitated these changes. Instead, you should note only the facts and allow mental health professionals to make such diagnoses.

Making Sure Patients are Cared For

It’s important as a home health care worker working with mentally ill individuals to make sure that they are complying with their treatment regimen. This means for example that you need to ensure that the person is taking their medication on time and in the correct doses.

You must also watch carefully to ensure that dangerous behaviors do not put your patients in harm’s way. When danger does present itself, you should call 911 to get emergency workers to help deal with the problems rather than attempting to deal with it on your own. For example, if your mentally challenged patient overdoses on sleeping pills, you should call 911 immediately rather than try to induce vomiting on your own.