Free mental health screening for U.S. Military

U.S. military personnel and their families now have a free, anonymous Web-based mental health and alcohol self-screening program. The service is available worldwide and provides immediate results, plus referrals to military mental health services. Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Health Affairs the program is offered through the nonprofit organization Screening for Mental Health. It screens for a number of common problems. It enables users to identify their individual symptoms and to seek help before the situation becomes dire. Program users can do self-screening for depression, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and alcohol abuse. The program provides immediate results and information about resources provided through the DOD and VA when the self-screening is completed.

This screening is ONLY a screening and is not meant to be a diagnostic tool of any kind. For a thorough, detailed assessment and treatment seek a qualified mental health professional.

Believe in Life!

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."

---William James

Need a therapy visit? What about on-line?

On-line, web visits, e-visits are coming to Michigan! Beginning next month, our very own prestigious University of Michigan plans to make medical consultation Web visits available through 13 participating doctors at its Briarwood Family Medicine office in Ann Arbor. The program is a pilot project that will run for 1 year. The Henry Ford Health System in Dearborn, Michigan is also starting a similar program.

The value, convenience and efficiency of on-line consultations have become more and more evident to patients and practitioners. The State of Michigan and Interface Consultation Services and Counseling Connections, located in Michigan, are seeking innovative and creative ways to offer quality services to an increasingly busy population. This population generally doesn’t have the time to take off of work to go to a therapy or medical appointments but nevertheless needs these services.

Counseling Connections provides on-line counseling for stress, adjustment issues and other emotionally distressing concerns. Make a therapy visit on-line! Come in at 2 am when you are unable to sleep, in your PJ’s if you like. We can’t see you! We CAN listen, we can give you are professional feedback and the support that you need to start living the quality of life you are seeking. Take a seat during a 15 minute work break when you are about to explode from all the personalities and demands of your work environment. Log on to us when you are waiting to pick up your kids or on the weekend when you have moment to collect your thoughts. We so look forward to meeting with you and seeing you fly! Contact Us.

Natural Supports & Coping with Stress

Natural supports (or social supports) are a key ingredient in coping with stressful life events. Friends, family, colleagues and other healthy relationship connections provide us with often needed support during times when our own personal resources in coping are depleted or strained. These relationships are powerful and offer us opportunities to gain affirming and positive energy, provide us with a healthy distraction from our immediate stress and serve to remind us we are all connected in the human experience. Sharing our thoughts, perceptions and feelings about circumstances affecting us also allows for a mutual expression between each other; this sharing helps to normalize our stress and give us a perspective on things that may otherwise be distorted or reactive. Professional counseling and psychiatric services can aid us during overwhelming stressful times as well and should be utilized as a compliment to our developing and maintaining natural support resources. For more on healthy natural supports, read Natural Supports.

Self-Diagnosing

As the general population becomes increasingly exposed to and educated about mental illness and options for treatment, we are seeing both a lessening of the stigma around mental health as well as an increase in self-diagnosing of psychological disorders. For so many years, mental illness was viewed with negativity, apprehension and misconception. In more recent years, there has been a greater understanding and acceptance that people do indeed suffer from emotional and psychological illness and this awareness has opened doors for those in need of professional treatment services. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, like with anything, there does exist an upside and a downside.

The downside of more available information on mental illness and mental health is the phenomenon of self-diagnosing. “I am Bipolar”, “I am ADHD”, “my child is schizophrenic”, “and my child is schizophrenia, bipolar and ADHD”. This is not uncommon. We do believe that like all of us, people are trying to understand and explain the nature of their distress by attaching a diagnostic label. This labeling often makes it easier for individuals to understand and communicate to others the nature of their concerns. It gives them something tangible in a not so tangible, often confusing area of describing human behavior. Generally, people are not deliberately fabricating a mental illness by self-diagnosing but the caution is that a diagnostic label can have very powerful consequences. Labels often affect how people perceive themselves, how others begin to view them and how some treatment providers even direct their interventions. This can be dangerous.

Through a thorough and comprehensive mental health evaluation an accurate diagnosis can be made. The reality is that this kind of evaluation may take several visits. Any attempt to attach a label otherwise is discouraged and potentially harmful in many ways. We encourage people search for understanding, meaning in their lives. How do we find answers and explanations for their emotional, behavioral and psychological concerns? A skilled licensed mental health professional can assist you in getting the help that you need. The first step can be the hardest. To the extent that a diagnosis is made is really secondary to a person getting the help needed to improve their life quality of life. Contact Us for a FREE consultation.

Fear in Healthcare Triage

In our experience of providing mental health services and facilating human healing, we frequently encounter individuals that are driven day-to-day by their fears. We even see that fear can dominate the practice of helping professionals as they go about their interaction and service with patients. It is not uncommon for healthcare professionals to have biased perceptions, fear-driven hypotheses and fear-distorted assessments of situations that result in ideas that “something horrible could happen if”. Fear as the basis for living, for any human being, is self-destructive in nature and generally brings much suffering and misery to a person’s life.

In a quote by Edmund Burke, he says, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

Clearly there are emergency medical and mental health situations where legitimate safety concerns exist and a responsive intervention can be life-saving. “Emergency” situations do tend to heighten the emotions, trigger our suppressed fears and can result in a fight or flight-type decision-making process. We are all human beings and our experiences have an effect on our being. Keep your cool, keep your head, calm down, take a deep breath, count to 10, stop and think, relax are all phrases that serve to promote objective, rational thought process followed, hopefully, by a reasonable and appropriate intervention. For individuals working in healthcare situations were emergencies can and do exist, it is important that professionals exercise self-examination; regularly reviewing their own fears, their own stress levels and how they see themselves handling “emergency” situations that call on their use of rational thinking and technical skills.

Behavioral Healthcare for the helping professional is one of our areas of expertise. We recognize the value of taking care of ourselves in order to most effectively help others. Contact us directly for more information.

"Being With"

Therapy, counseling, treatment are industry names with a similar face. People come to therapy for various reasons. Some are interested being educated, some are motivated by situational stress and others experience ongoing conflicts and turmoil in their relationships. Therapeutic benefit is a rather subjective phrase and clearly defined by some appreciable and obvious improvement in the client’s situation/mood/behavior, etc. Clinical experience has taught us that achieving a positive and observable improvement or change in a person’s situation occurs due various components in the treatment process, teaching, guiding, assessing, coordinating to name a few. Perhaps, the most powerful and even most vital factor contributing to positive treatment outcome consists of “being with”. Being with involves the counselor’s sincere, genuine, unconditional investment in their client’s life. Being with is a dynamic, yet often subtle energy that exists between clinician and client; it is often described as “an intensity” and such is more often “felt” than seen. Most people that pursue counseling treatment are searching for this connectedness to another human being. A therapist’s ability to “be with” their client in a balanced psychologically intimate and professionally objective way is crucial to laying a foundation for relief, growth and mental health.

Therapeutic benefit is rarely achieved unless the therapeutic relationship is developed, maintained and maximized. Finding a therapist that can “be with” you in your efforts toward personal improvement is essential. You will “feel” it when it exists.

Death and Dying

The transition from the death of a loved one can be like a death of ourselves, dying of the old way of being in the world and awaking to a new way. After death there is a re-evaluating of the world; how will life be different?

Death changes people. It’s like a rude awaking from a slumber that we never want to awake from. We want to stay innocent in our beliefs and feelings. “It won’t happen to me, It won’t be so painful, Death, I don’t even think about it...” Now it’s all you think about…angry, sad, refusing to believe it’s true, crying at little things that trigger your grief.

It is a transition; we are never the same after looking death in the face. People who find a way to move through the pain to the rebirthing of death find that they can become more compassionate, have a deeper understanding of life, passion for living, a resilience and wisdom they have not had before. Some people can also become stuck in the grieving process and have a hard time moving through the pain. Let us know if we can help.

Combat Stress in Iraq

For Americans who are being exposed to the stress of combat, many at sometime or another will require some assistance from what the military calls the combat stress control (CSC) team. This is a team consists of a psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, etc. They attempt to take immediate short-term action in these cases. Sometimes the actions of this team are enough but at other times, this stress can continue to plaque our men and women and result in more long-term residual effects of combat which may require longer term treatments. Seek a licensed professional for longer term treatment as necessary.

Scientific American Mind indicates, “We are not so naïve as to believe that these warriors will be completely unaffected by their experiences. But by adapting psychological principles common in the civilian sector to the battlefield, psychologists and CSC teams can mitigate the damaging effects of the inevitable stresses of war.”

When is a Man Educated?

"When he can look out upon the universe, now lucid and lovely, now dark and terrible, with a sense of his own littleness in the great scheme of things and yet have faith and courage. When he knows how to make friends and keep them and above all, when he can keep friends with himself.

When he can be happy alone and high-minded amid the drudgeries of life.
When he can look into a wayside puddle and see something besides mud, and into the face of the most forlorn mortal and see something divine.

When he knows how to live, how to love, how to hope, how to pray - is glad to live...And has in his heart a bit of a song."
-Joseph Fort Newton

I have picked up, used, walked by this box of tea for months now. Just this morning, I decided to read this quote. I thought it might be of interest to you. It gave me something to ponder as I woke to the day before the sun rose and coffee awaken my veins to a new day.

Emotional Health

People with good emotional health
are in control of their thoughts, feelings
and behaviors.

They feel positive about themselves
and have good relationships.

They can keep their problems in perspective.

They have both self-awareness
and self-control.

Counseling Connections is committed to helping people better understand their emotional health while providing techniques to effect a positive and balanced emotional lifestyle.

The Benefits of Journaling

Stress and stress-reduction can be related. We all realize that stress is an inevitable experience of daily living. “It’s not all a bed of roses” as some wise person once said. It’s what we do to manage or reduce stress that can make the difference between misery and balance. When we learn and practice “healthy” techniques to manage our negative thoughts, overwhelming emotions and urge to behave self-destructively, we develop a coping attitude and healthy skillsets. These tools then become available to us now and in our future.

We will always be confronted with some type of stress throughout our lives; we cannot control that, but our responses or reactions are within our control. Journaling or personal writing can be one of those effective skills available to us. In general, some benefits of journaling include: it’s flexible and easy, helps us know ourselves better, enhances creativity and intuition, captures our life story, aids in problem solving and healing, enhances personal growth and of course aids in reducing stress.

Learn more about the benefits of journaling at Journaling Benefits or CONTACT US!

"The Patch" for Depression

Emsam developed by Somerset Pharmaceuticals is the first “patch” to be approved by the FDA for the treatment of depression. One of the biggest hurdles for people is taking their medications on a regular basis. For many people it can be very easy to forget medications if they don’t often take medications or if they take multiple medications. So the development of an antidepressant distributed through a patch might help increase compliance and therefore the efficacy of the treatment program.

Emsam (Selegiline) is a MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor) type of antidepressant that are very effective but do have more side effects than the SSRIs (Prozac, Paxil, etc). C-Health reports Although health officials say MAOIs are safe when used correctly, the drugs can cause dangerous interactions, including sudden and severe rises in blood pressure that can lead to stroke and death, when patients consume food or drinks that contain a substance called tyramine. The substance is found in draft beer, red wine, fava beans, salamis, aged cheeses, soy sauce and other products. Bristol-Myers and Somerset said Emsam patients, when using the six-milligram or lowest strength patch, shouldn't have to watch their diets. That represents a "significant advance" over other MAOIs typically taken in pill form, said Dr. Steven Galson, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

This exciting treatment option provides more ways for people to receive the treatment that they need for a very treatable illness but medication is only one tool to getting better. Research indicates the best and most effective treatment for depression is a combination of medication and counseling or therapy. Contact us for a FREE consultation.

Parenting Ideas

BE There...

If they are crabby, put them in water.

If they are unlovable, love yourself.

Reveal your own dreams.

Encourage playfulness and laughter....

Surprise them.

Remember how small they really are.

HANDLE with care!

Search for the positive.

Say YES as often as possible.