Articles from the Week of November 17, 2023
Explanation for Interesting Quotes and Fascinating Facts: While scanning the Internet for counseling articles, I sometimes run into these quotes and interesting facts, and add them as I go along. If you’re not interested, you can just jump to the Counseling Articles.
Interesting Quotes
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.
Charles Dickens
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
Abraham Lincoln
Faith grows when it is lived and shaped by Love.
Pope Francis
"Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid."
RONALD REAGAN
Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like unrequited love.
Charlie Brown
I realized that I don't have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up and enjoy the messy, imperfect, and beautiful journey of my life.
Kerry Washington
In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve … is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves.
Randy Pausch
Every child deserves a champion — an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.
Rita F. Pierson
Fascinating Facts (from InterestingFacts.com unless otherwise noted)
How many miles of blood vessels are found in the human body?
If you laid out all of your blood vessel systems end to end, the average adults’ would be around 100,000 miles long! (Source: NeedtoKnowFacts.com).
“Russian cosmonauts used to pack shotguns in case they had to fight off bears after landing” (Source: NeedtoKnowFacts.com).
Woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth when the Egyptian pyramids were being built. (Source: HistoryFacts.com)
How many trees are on earth?
Answer: 3 trillion (Source:NeedtoKnowFacts.com)
How fast can a hummingbird flap its wings?
Answer: 80 times per second (Source:NeedtoKnowFacts.com)
Counseling Articles
The Importance of Dad's Involvement Is Indisputable. A New Report Confirms It.
This multi-year study of several thousand parents in Great Britain found that when fathers were actively engaged in activities like reading, drawing, playing, telling stories, singing, or listening to and talking about music their children did better in school. Mother’s involvement was also important in children’s emotional and interpersonal development, but father’s involvement showed up especially in their children’s academic development.
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Marijuana Use Tied to Heart Failure, MI, Stroke
More bad news for recreational pot users. Daily pot use was correlated with a 34% increased risk for heart failure after adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity, alcohol use, smoking, education, employment, income, health insurance, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and BMI.
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How I Learned to Stop Hiding My Bipolar Disorder
If you have a client who is embarrassed about their mental disorder and is trying to hide its existence from her colleagues and friends, discussing this article with him or her might be helpful.
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We Grieve Too
If you work long enough in the mental health field, you too will have a client or a student whose life ends, either intentionally, or unintentionally. We sometimes are unaware of this, but physicians also grieve when a client’s life ends. When that happens I hope you will have one or more people with whom you can share your feelings.
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The College Survival Guide for Students with ADHD
Many teens with ADHD do not complete college and often this is for preventable reasons. This is an excellent comprehensive guide. However, it may be overwhelming for some students. I think it would be best if a student could discuss the steps with someone with whom they have a good relationship with or with an advisor who understands ADHD.
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Growing 'Tranq' Threat Poses Challenges for PCPs
If you’ve heard brief comments about “tranq” but didn’t know a lot about it, this article is a good primer.
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Overcoming Guilt from Bipolar Mood Episodes
When people with bipolar disorder are either in a manic or depressed episode they often do things that damage relationships. Here is some excellent advice on how to apologize, make amends when appropriate, and let go of guilt feelings over what they did during those episodes.
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How many children have to die before Instagram will do something?
I don’t use Instagram, but apparently many young people do, and reportedly it is a prime vehicle for sexual extortion. “Sexual extortion is the use of sexual images to blackmail the person or persons depicted. The blackmail may be for the purpose of obtaining money or more sexually explicit material, coercion into in-person sex or sex trafficking, pressuring the person to stay in a relationship, or other benefits to the perpetrator.” In one research it was found that “in 88% of child sexual extortion cases, the perpetrator initially contacted the child on Instagram or Snapchat.” Therefore if you are a parent of teens, or you counsel parents of teens, you may want to warn them of the dangers of this social media platform.
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‘A Monster’: Super Meth and Other Drugs Push Crisis Beyond Opioids
You won’t be able to read this article unless you have a subscription to the New York Times, but if you do have a subscription it is well worth your time, even if you do not specialize in substance abuse. It discusses how much more complicated it is becoming to provide substance abuse treatment for several reasons—(1) the development of new drugs such as “supermeth,” (2) the fact that drug dealers often intentionally formulate their drugs so they also contain other drugs, and users become addicted to other drugs they do not even know they are taking, and (3) the fact that some drugs have no treatments available. It is clear that young people who buy and use drugs off the street are playing Russian roulette with their lives.
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God Always Gets the Last Laugh: Radical Outlet Named After Demonic Woman Shuts Doors
The website named Jezebel has closed down, apparently for financial reasons.
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First-Ever Adult ADHD Guidelines Forthcoming
Although the Adult ADHD Guidelines are not out yet, this article previews some of the changes that will be coming. Adult women with ADHD, who were often not diagnosed earlier in their lives, will probably especially benefit from the proposed changes.
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Learning to Ride Out Your Urges With Bipolar
Addictions can happen to anyone, but can be particularly harmful to those with Bipolar I or 2, who may get into trouble, especially in manic or hypomanic episodes. This is a longer article than most from the bphope site but contains quite a few good ideas.
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Nepal Is Banning TikTok as Officials Say It Disturbs 'Social Harmony'
Most people and government officials are aware that some of the social media platforms have hazards associated with their use. Finally one country is taking significant action. It will be interesting to see if others follow.
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Darwinizing the Universe: A Theory That Explains Everything Explains Nothing
This is not a counseling article, but I thought some of you might be interested. This Breakpoint article discusses one of the newest books and theories attempting to explain how the universe and life came to be without an Intelligent Creator. There are so many gaps that this theory doesn’t explain such as how all the matter and energy in the universe could in a moment come into existence out of nothing, how in the first milliseconds of the universe a large number of variables necessary for matter, energy and life could be precisely coordinated, especially if these were all randomly generated, how living cells could come from non-living matter, etc. As has been said by others before, I believe it takes more faith to believe this could have all happened by chance than to believe it was created by an Intelligent Designer.
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Fun headlines from the Babylon Bee.
Newsom Hatches Plan to Burn All the Freeways Down So No More People Can Leave California
Hamas Says All The AK-47s Found in Gaza Hospital Were Strictly for Medicinal Use
The Dark Doctor of the Sexual Revolution: Alfred Kinsey and The Horrifying History of the Kinsey Institute
Although many academicians view Alfred Kinsey as an academic hero, some of us view him as a sexual predator who would be thrown in jail today because of his sexual abuse of infants, and because he severely misrepresented his data. If you would like more data to substantiate what I’ve said above you can read Judith Reisman’s book Kinsey, Sex and Fraud or either listen to or read the transcript of Albert Mohler’s broadcast from November 16, 2023.
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Is ADHD a Spectrum Disorder?
Some children with ADHD manifest quite differently than others. This article gives us a tantalizing explanation for why this may be so. Highly worthwhile reading, even if you do not specialize in working with children or working with clients with ADHD.
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Body Dysmorphic Disorder: Diagnosis Guidelines to Be Published in Europe
A European body is recommending that some new guidelines be implemented in diagnosing and treating body dysmorphic disorder. The new guidelines seem plausible: see what you think.
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Bipolar and Booze: A One-Sided Relationship
People with bipolar disorder use alcohol for a variety of reasons—to help them sleep, to relax them, to help them feel more comfortable in social situations, to numb feelings during depressive episodes, etc. The authors of this article make the point that to gain effective control of bipolar episodes that total non-use of alcohol is the best approach. If you have a bipolar client who uses alcohol for one or more of these reasons it might be a good article to discuss with him or her.
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5 Ways to Say 'I'm Not Drinking Tonight'
Whether your client has bipolar disorder or not, there are times when any client might prefer not to drink, but there is at least some social pressure to drink because everyone else is. Here are five different ways they might use to graciously turn down such pressures depending on the situation. Probably at least one would be appropriate for most any situation.
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Where Are the International Women’s Organizations as the Shocking Scale of Hamas’s Sexual Violence Against Israeli Women on October 7 Becomes Horrifyingly Clear?
This is not a counseling article, but the failure of international women’s organizations to name Hamas and detail the horrible atrocities they intentionally performed is glaringly obvious and hard to understand. The atrocities committed by Hamas were brutal. It is hard to believe that any human being could do such things to other human beings.
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Woman Sues American Academy of Pediatrics for Fraud and Malpractice
When you read this young girl’s story it seems incomprehensible that medical doctors would tell her that a sex change would solve all of her problems, without recommending counseling first. Let’s hope that her lawsuit is successful and may be an encouragement to others who were encouraged to believe that gender change would solve all the psychological problems they were experiencing.
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Gliosis, an Immune Response to Brain Injury, Is Found in Brains of Recovered COVID Patients With Lasting Depression and Cognitive Symptoms
Some people who have COVID have lasting psychological symptoms. This research attempted to find out whether there might be a medical basis for this. A medical change was found. It is still too early for a treatment to have been developed, but this insight may be worthwhile following.
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What Is Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome?
I include this article for your diagnostic consideration. It sounds a lot like ADHD: Inattentive Type. See what you think.
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Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones!
Henry Virkler