Articles from the Weeks of August 23, 2024

Explanation: Although I scan the Internet primarily for counseling articles, in the process I run across quotes and interesting facts that I sometimes include in these first two sections. If you’re just interested in the counseling articles, you can go directly to the section called Counseling Articles. HV

Interesting Quotes

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Dale Carnegie

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Gandhi

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas Edison (Inventor of a record-setting 1, 093 patents of things that do work)

“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”

MARGARET THATCHER

Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

1 Corinthians 13:7

I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.

Rita Mae Brown

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.

Maya Angelou

If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin.

Ivan Turgenev

Counseling Articles

Advanced Brain-Computer Interface Restores Near-Perfect Speech in ALS Patient

Previous brain-computer interfaces took lots of training and only reached about 75% accuracy. With this new interface the training period was much shorter, the computer produced voice tones quite like the patient's voice sounded pre-ALS (ALS= amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) (he had ALS for five years) and the accuracy was 97%. He was able to talk with his four-year-old daughter. For those with neurologic disorders and paralysis from accidents this is very promising.

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1 in 4 Unresponsive Coma Patients May Retain Some Awareness

New research has found that at least 1 in 4 coma patients retain some brain activity. This certainly has implications about how we talk about such patients when we are in their presence, but in light of the advances in brain-computer interfaces (see above article), we may in the future develop ways of helping these patients communicate with us.

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PTSD Needs a New Name, Experts Say — Here's Why

A group of psychiatrists, particularly those who work with military veterans, are pushing for inclusion of a new name in the DSM-5 (TR) such as Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, claiming that PTSD is stigmatizing and that it may reduce a client’s belief that there is any recovery. Especially in light of new treatments that are being developed, they believe that another diagnosis should be added to the DSM. Read the article and see what you think.

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New Study Reaffirms Inherent Differences between Male and Female Brains

Many contemporary psychology and counseling texts suggest that the differences between men and women’s brains are mainly a result of cultural conditioning. This article points to the findings that there are differences between how male and female brains function even before birth (before any conditioning has supposedly occurred) and that there are multiple differences in how male and female brains function after birth.

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Navigating the Three Kinds of Doubt

I had questions about including this article. But if you do take the time to read it, you might keep it and find it useful once in a while with a Christian client who is wrestling with something about their Christian faith.

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The Michigan Conversion Therapy Ban Violates Human Nature and Religious Freedom

Sometimes people struggling with questions of gender identity go to counselors to sort out these questions. In most states counselors can encourage them to pursue a gender transition, but if the counselor would say anything that might encourage them to confirm their natal gender, they might be accused of conversion therapy. In some states, they might even risk losing their counseling license. It is this law in Michigan that is the subject of this article, but the issue affects counselors in many states. In other newspaper articles from here in the U.S. and other countries I have read of people who underwent gender transition and then decided they had made a mistake and talked with doctors or counselors about help transition back to their natal gender. In some cases their doctors or counselors were unwilling to provide such help for fear that they would be accused of “conversion therapy.” It seems like political correctness is trumping counseling ethics in that we are supposed to let the client determine the goals they have for therapy as long as those goals are legal and would be healthy for the client.

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Dementia Deemed Highly Preventable: Here’s How

This headline may be a little too positive, for it seems to suggest all dementia is preventable. If you read the article, you’ll see that it says that about 50% of dementia is preventable by modifying one or more of 14 factors that in most cases, we can modify if we are intentional about it. I think we should think of ways to get this information out to our churches and communities.

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A Tale of Two Sisters (and Two ADHDs)

Here’s an interesting blog from a mother who has two children with ADHD. It sounds like one has hyperactive or combined type and the other has inattentive type.

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Q: “What Are the Best Planners for ADHD Brains? Paper or Digital?”

Paper planners are best for students with ADHD, but educators I’ve talked with say that taking notes on paper seems to help students in general learn the material better than taking notes on their laptops. That generalization may not hold true for all students. It’s probably best to let them experiment and decide which is best for them.

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How Your Gut Microbiome Prevents the Loss of Muscle Mass

Sarcopenia, or loss of muscle mass and strength, is an important factor in middle and old age, and can lead to a variety of medical issues including falls, fractures and disabilities. This research study found that a diet that is rich in fruits, vegetables and fermented foods such as yogurt enhances the body’s microbiome and reduces sarcopenia. So if you or your clients are middle-aged and older you may want to pay attention to this article.

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CBT Tops Mindfulness Therapy for Prolonged Grief Disorder

We all experience a period of grief when we lose someone who was important to us, but some people experience prolonged grief that lasts for years. A controlled experiment compared the effectiveness of CBT with an equal number of sessions of mindfulness therapy for prolonged grief disorder. It found that both therapies produced benefit, but CBT produced greater symptom reduction.

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Supreme Court stops Biden's Title IX rules allowing boys in girls' sports

The Biden administration broadened the definition of sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity, which would have allowed boys to enter girls’ bathrooms, girls’ locker rooms, and participate in girls’ sports. The Supreme Court put the rules on hold in the thirteen states who filed this lawsuit until lower court issues have been resolved. There is still a need for Christians to pray that these issues will be resolved in a way that is fair to all students.

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Major medical group expresses skepticism about sex-change surgeries for kids

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, which represents 92% of plastic surgeons in the U.S., has said they do not encourage their members to perform gender conversion surgeries, believing there is not adequate research to justify such surgeries. Reportedly the fact that the consensus for removing age-restrictions for gender-affirming treatment among other U.S. professional medical groups came because of pressure from trans-identified Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel [formerly Richard] Levine.

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A Personalized Brain Pacemaker for Parkinson’s

You may not be able to read this article without a subscription to the New York Times, so I’ll give you a summary: small studies (just a few patients) have found some improvements not only with Parkinsonism, but also with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and chronic pain, with individualized deep brain stimulation when brain pacemakers are individualized to each of them. While these studies are small, they do give hope that with further research they can provide help for more people.

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ADHD medication treatment linked to reduced accident rates requiring hospitalization and reduced mortality rates

For several months I’ve been trying to discover a way to get these summaries of research studies regarding ADHD by Dr. David Rabiner, Research Professor at Duke University to you, but without success (he sends them to me and others at my personal email address, but doesn’t post them on the web). However, he finds such good studies that I’ve decided to give you a summary of some of the studies he cites without a hypertext link. This week he summarized two studies. People with ADHD have higher accident rates and increased premature mortality than those without ADHD. One study of 147,000 individuals over a two-year period found that the premature mortality was reduced by 19% for those who took medication versus those who did not.

In a second study, this one in Canada over 20 years with more than 200,000 individuals found that premature mortality rate was lowered by about 1/3 for those who took stimulant medication but was unchanged for those who took non-stimulant medication. However, E.R. visits and hospitalization were lower by about 1/3 for those who took either stimulant or non-stimulant medication.  

I could not get the link for the first article, but if you’d like to read the second original study the hypertext link is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-024-02825-y.

Replika offers AI romantic companions with unexpected user age demographics

Replika has sometimes been criticized for offering AI romantic companions (chatbots). Their CEO, Eugenia Kuyda, said that their primary purpose is to provide friendship and support. And although some have theorized their primary customers would be young men, she says that the majority of their customers are over 35 and include both men and women.

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Why Do Neurologists Prescribe CT, MRI, and PET Scans?

We’ve probably all heard of computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron electron tomography (PET) scans, but unless we’ve had some medical training, we may not know much about these scans and when one or the other is used. This is a good introduction to the three scans and the ways they are used.

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Parents of Texas school shooter found not liable in 2018 rampage that left 10 dead

If you are counseling parents who have guns in their homes you probably should read this article. This Texas couple was found not guilty, but the article tells of some other parents who were found guilty and even sentenced to jail when they failed to take adequate precautions to keep weapons from being accessed by their children.

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When Is Sexual Behavior Out of Control?

This is an article in Medscape Psychiatry that is a good review of the ICD-11 diagnosis of compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD). Although you may have some differences with occasional statements in the article, I think it is good to be reminded of how secular therapists view sexuality.

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How compassionate communities can transform the lives of schizophrenia patients

This short article is written by a psychiatrist in Pakistan, but I think it’s message is one that we could helpfully take to families and church families here in the U.S. See what you think.

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Mania and Menopause

Recently I read a column in a British newspaper (the Telegraph) about a middle-aged woman in a stable marriage who went through perimenopause and went from sex once a week to what she described as a hormonally-driven sixteen-year-old boy who wanted sex all the time. She said it drove her to a seven-month-affair, which ended when her sexual drive returned to it’s normal level. She didn’t share whether she ever disclosed the affair to her husband, but she has continued in her stable marriage. This brief note in this psychiatric journal indicates that her experience is not rare. It might come up with one or more of your clients.

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Don’t say these 16 things to loved ones with dementia, experts warn

Probably a few of these statements or questions you would never make to someone with dementia, but there are some others we might honestly make without being aware that they are unhelpful. The article helpfully explains why each of these is unwise to make and alternatives to use.

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Alcohol Use Worsens Bipolar Symptoms, Study Finds

This might seem like common sense, but it’s found that many people with Bipolar 1 and 2 continue to use alcohol, perhaps with the hope that alcohol will moderate their symptoms. This research study found that alcohol worsens bipolar symptoms. Therefore if you counsel a person with either of the bipolar disorders, encourage them that use of alcohol, rather than moderating their symptoms, exacerbates them.

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What Can We Learn from Arranged Marriages?

Many Americans, with our preference for personal choice, question the value of arranged marriages, which are still the norm in some countries. But the process and frequency of divorces among people who take part in arranged marriages, even here in the United States, is significantly lower than in couples who make their own decisions about who to marry. You may find this article about arranged marriages both interesting and thought-provoking.

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Feminists Groups Criticize UN on Gender Ideology and Surrogacy

It is of interest that several feminist groups are criticizing the UN for adopting gender ideology, and their reasons for doing so are reasons that most of us would agree with.

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Planet Earth — Finely Tuned by a Creator

Not a counseling article, but a seven-minute video that I think any Christian adult and child six and above would enjoy. It talks about fine-tuning a planet so that it can support life and concludes that it is probable that the only planet in the universe that can support life is the earth. I encourage everyone to watch this fascinating video.

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Have a wonderful week or weekend,

Henry Virkler