What do we mean by “disenfranchised grief.” It’s when your experience of grief is different than the general cultural attitudes about “justified” pain regarding death and loss or “acceptable” mourning practices. Being out of “the norm” in your grief experience often tend to exacerbate the pain as people can feel very alone.
In this conversation, Candace Opper talks about her experience losing a childhood acquaintance to suicide and how this event stayed with her for decades.
The strongest buffer for kids is a relationship with at least one loving, caring, responsive adult - a family member, a teacher, a coach, a mentor.
Having a source of reliable nurturing protects them from further harm and helps them develop self-regulation skills. In addition a healthy child-adult relationship gives them a sense of safety in the storm and a glimmer of hope for things to come.
In this episode I speak with Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Kimberly O’Brien about how our youth can feel “emotionally naked” and how caring adults can help provide does of support that fuel resilience and self-esteem, and ultimately prevent suicide.
How do we communicate about suicide with teens? Perhaps, they are the ones in the best position to tell us.
The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention recommends strategy, safety and a positive narrative when messaging about suicide. Messages and images that encourage hope are better than ones that imply "nothing can be done." Messages that celebrate resilience, healing journeys and compassion are better than ones that romanticize death or are voyeuristic or sensationalized. Messages that inspire action like reaching out or offering compassion are more valuable than ones that perpetuate misinformation and myths.
In this podcast we learn some best practices in enrolling our youth to be these positive, safe, and effective messengers for suicide prevention and mental health promotion.
About 350 years ago, philosopher René Descartes took the brain out of the body – and we’ve been trying to put it back ever since. Descartes believed that the immaterial mind was separate from that matter of the body, and this dualism started many down a path of treating mind and body differently.
In this episode, we work to reunite the two to explore how their interconnectivity affects well-being. In this episode, we talk about how critical bodily functions like sleep, pain and our stress response are so closely tied to our emotional health. My guest Whitney McKnight, a clinical reporter whose work has focused primarily on the brain, encourages us to be our own scientists in our approach to understanding anxiety and depression and to always “improve our questions.”
