Caregivers are of course affected by the people they serve. Our proximity to someone else’s disease whether it be physical and/or mental can and does take its toll on us. I write about this in my dissertation where I focus on the perceived boundaries we create between ourselves as staff and the patient/resident of a treatment facility. It was an attempt to describe how being around people with certain disorders causes us to take on some of their characteristics and be disturbed by them. In other words, we can’t help but me affected by who and what we encounter, especially when it comes to major diseases of the body and mind.

On this note, Wired Science has a post worth noting titled “Dementia Caregivers More Likely to Also Get the Disease.” Here is an excerpt:

Elderly people who care for a spouse who has dementia are at increased risk of developing dementia themselves, a study finds. The stress of attending to a mentally incapacitated spouse may somehow contribute to the added risk, scientists report in the May Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Previous studies have shown that chronic stress leads to increased levels of the hormone cortisol in the body, which can suppress immunity, says study co-author Peter Rabins, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore who teamed with researchers at Utah State University in Logan to do this study. “It’s long been thought that this might have adverse outcomes psychologically and physiologically.”

We have been trying to get our minds around how social media sites are impacting the culture, specifically the lives of children and adolescents. Our contention is that young people aren’t developmentally ready to handle these sophisticated tools. Privacy and discretion are hard enough for adults to manage, especially with rapidly changing communication technologies in an identified age of Narcissism, where self and other boundaries are disintegrating.

We are now expected to expose ourselves to others and a world filled with total strangers. In this context, we are stepping through a minefield of forming our identities, building and maintaining relationships, deciding who we should connect with and what is appropriate to share. But, it’s a little late in the game to be asking if children and adolescents can handle this much access and exposure. A dramatic example and case that illustrates this point can be found at The Epoch Times in an article titled “Facebook Under Fire for Lack of ‘Panic Button’.” Here is an excerpt:

The social networking site Facebook has been accused of failing to protect young British users from the threat posed by pedophiles.

The U.S.-owned site, which has 23 million users in the U.K., has so far refused to display a “panic button” through which young people can report abuse directly to officials.

In so doing, the site has become a safe haven for predatory pedophiles, senior police officials and politicians said on Tuesday.

The criticism comes after the jailing on Monday of Peter Chapman for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall. Chapman, a 33-year-old convicted double rapist, had groomed Ashleigh through Facebook by posing as a teenage boy. The pair swapped mobile phone numbers and agreed to meet.

As we experience radical shifts in our ability to communicate with and have access to one another we can notice the erosion of established boundaries in terms of discretion and privacy. Nowhere are the boundaries more compromised then when it comes to our children and how they are exposed to and expose themselves to each other and the world outside their limited sense of awareness. Children and adolescents aren’t psychologically able to fully recognize the broader implications of their actions. How their decisions to share parts of themselves have long term consequences can be beyond them. They don’t have enough maturity or experience to know the harm that comes when they send sexually explicit or provocative pictures of themselves or others through their cell phones, known as sexting. Read more…

The New York Review of Books has a must read article titled “The Rape of American Prisoners” detailing the alarming numbers of rapes against youth in correctional/detention facilities and the types of conditions that cause these acts of sexual violence to happen. If you have worked in treatment or detention facilities where adolescents are placed you know how the weak are taken advantage of by the stronger and those in power. Read more…

After the last post “Cultural Symptoms: The 2000′ Law and Youth Sex Offenders continued….” where we once again focused on the perils of mobile technology and social media networks for children and adolescents we feel compelled to ask the question when should our youth have access to cell phones and social media sites? A cell phone can be a weapon in the hands of a child and/or adolescent as seen in the emerging trend of teen sexting. As fast as mobile technology and social media sites like myspace and facebook have eneterd our culture we have not had enough time or understanding of their use and misuse to effectively answer the question. In reality, the train has already left the station when as a Pew Research poll suggests:

Since the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project first started tracking teen cell phone use, the age at which American teens acquire their first cell phone has consistently grown younger. In Pew Internet’s 2004 survey of teens, 18% of 12-year-olds owned a cell phone. In 2009, 58% of 12 year-olds own a cell phone. We also have found that cell phone ownership increases dramatically with age: 83% of teens age 17 now own a cell phone, up from 64% in 2004.

Read more…

The questions we most often confront surround how do we live with the thoughts, feelings and actions of others without becoming overwhelmed or lost in them? If we are honest with ourselves each of us to varying degrees of intensity are manipulating others to get our perceived needs, wants and desires met. It’s as if from infancy on we learn through watching others and then our own experiences how to invade a person’s personal space. This process of crossing boundaries is rooted in who and what we have witnessed and then replicated in our own lives. All around us we view boundaries being crossed and obliterated. So to answer the question above we must first establish an understanding of what boundaries are, which ones can be effectively managed and maintained and what illusions do we have about holding them. Read more…

An article from the NYT titled “A Trauma That Rippled Outward” highlights the mental health community’s response to working with survivors, families and citizens of New York City during the time that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001 . Here is an excerpt:

“Sept. 11 was very quickly framed as a mental health emergency,” said Karen M. Seeley, a psychotherapist and a professor of psychological anthropology at Columbia University. But most therapists, trained in the main to help people one at a time, were not ready for this “collective catastrophe,” Dr. Seeley said. “For everybody, it was unprecedented. Firefighters weren’t prepared. Police weren’t prepared. Neither were therapists.”

Dr. Seeley spent the better part of two years conducting in-depth interviews with 35 therapists who had worked closely with 9/11 survivors and families. They formed the basis for a book called “Therapy After Terror: 9/11, Psychotherapists and Mental Health” and published last year by Cambridge University Press.

What she learned was that the pros in her field not only were ill prepared for the disaster but also became overwhelmed by the horrific stories that they heard and by their own terrorism-induced anxieties. Obviously, victims’ families suffered most. But all New Yorkers were traumatized to some degree. Their city had been attacked. As the country entered a constant state of war, they were told by political leaders to be afraid. Many were.

Being human, therapists often succumbed to the same fears. Dr. Seeley called it “simultaneous trauma” — “an extremely rare clinical situation in which therapists were deeply shaken by the same catastrophic events that injured the patients they were treating.”

Read more…

Raising children is the most challenging responsibility we take on in our lifetimes. Bringing a child into the world or caring for him or her if they do not have parents or a family of their own is where we find out who we really are. Being a parent or primary caregiver in this regard is a crucible where our own identities have to confront the developing identity of a child we are trying to help grow up. Our children are not a carbon copy of us, nor are they a reclamation project designed to provide us an opportunity to relive lost dreams, failures and mistakes through them. When we view children this way we only set them up to lose their own dreams, and carry on our failures and mistakes. Their job is find out who they are. Our job is to continue to do the same for ourselves while guiding them down their own paths. Read more…

We are not here to say we should not judge others, it is simply not possible to do so. Our daily lives are filled with judgments toward others. We are projecting what we think and feel about how someone conducts his or her life all the time. In fact, we have to make judgments about others as a way of orienting ourselves in our own actions and mapping a path ahead in terms of who and what to watch out for and protect ourselves and those we love from. The negative behaviors of others becomes our moral compass for our own behaviors, providing warning signs against what we are doing in our own lives, what can happen to us, and how not to act. What judging others is not is a way of escaping or denying how we are behaving. Read more…

What we witness in others and experience for ourselves contains all that we can know and/or understand. Nowhere is this statement more relevant than when applied to the relationships we build and the ones we have to leave because they do not work for us. A number of years ago the thesis for my graduate degree in Organizational Management attempted to answer the question why do we stay in abusive or hostile work environments? It was a question I had to explore because of what I had witnessed not only in my father’s professional life, but my own as well. As subordinate, supervisor, manager and director in nonprofit, service, and corporate sectors I witnessed and experienced how systems of management and the cultivation of relationships were built on mistrust, fear and yes domination and abuse. People will put up with an inordinate amount of degradation and suffering to stay on top, move up the ladder or just cope in their work environments. Read more…