Sarah Whalen, PsyD

Therapists have a big advantage in the therapy office. We've read a stack of books and spent thousands of hours learning what to do in session. Clients have to learn as they go, costing them valuable time and money. Here are a few pointers to help clients level the playing field.

It’s fun being a psychologist. Just as an engineer is fascinated by the true mechanics of electrical circuitry, we mental health professionals are intensely curious about the human brain.  In the process of doing our job day after day, we can often pick up on patterns and connections that give us flashes of a bigger picture.

When he was younger, Angelo Andreatos, now 48, was so self-conscious about his peers' opinion of him that he skipped out on social events if he had a pimple. By middle age, Andreatos stopped leaving his house for extended periods – sometimes a year or two at a time. He couldn't answer the phone because the mere thought of making conversation with a stranger – a takeout delivery person, a sales representative – terrified him.

According to Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S., Associate Editor at Psych Central, children with ADHD can experience low self-esteem. Some of the staple characteristics of ADHD include not being able to focus, not being able to complete tasks especially not in a timely manner, being distracted easily, and being impulsive. All of these traits can lead to adults and even sometimes other children becoming frustrated with the child with ADHD.

What is it like to have ADHD? A conversation last term with an extremely bright biomolecular engineering major who also happens to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) resulted in his writing the following thoughts—complete with footnotes—to help to have a better understanding of his experience as a college freshman.

Throughout my career as a physician, I had always believed that pain was based in anatomical structural abnormalities or disease processes that damage the nervous system—a broken ankle, a surgical incision, back pain from a herniated disc, diabetes, or neurological disease. I thought it was all treatable with the right medication, procedural intervention, or operation. Never in my wildest dreams would I have realized that so much of chronic pain, a complex disorder that is entirely different from acute pain, is related to the organ system that’s housed in our skulls—the brain.

Are you an excessive worrier? Perhaps you subconsciously think that if you "worry enough," you can prevent bad things from happening. But the fact is, worrying can affect the body in ways that may surprise you. When worrying becomes excessive, it can lead to feelings of high anxiety and even cause you to be physically ill.

Although meditation still isn’t exactly mainstream, many people practice it, hoping to stave off stress and stress-related health problems. Mindfulness meditation, in particular, has become more popular in recent years. The practice involves sitting comfortably, focusing on your breathing, and then bringing your mind’s attention to the present without drifting into concerns about the past or future.

Sixty percent of people who experience a single episode of depression are likely to experience a second. Ninety percent of people who go through three episodes of depression are likely to have a fourth. But help is available: The 8-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) program been shown to reduce the risk of relapse.

There’s a chasm between ignoring the fact that life is difficult in the present moment and thinking that life will always be difficult. Are you willing to acknowledge the depression rather than live in it? Can you adjust your expectation from you will always be happy to life is cyclical and although hardships come, they also go and this too shall pass