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My colleague and friend, Dr. Eric Jannazzo, recently posted an excellent reply to Jonathan Alpert’s recent New York Times article that’s had the therapy community buzzing over the last couple of weeks. Check out Eric’s thoughtful piece here. I know there are a million articles and comments out there in response to Mr. Alpert’s article, but I’d love to see additional thoughts here if you have them! As a follow up to the recent post on how to get the most out of your appointment with a psychiatrist, there’s this news. I’d love to be a fly on the wall during that conversation… “Here are your options, Patient Smith: you can start Prozac, which will take a few weeks to kick in, likely decrease your sex drive, and may not do anything at all for you…OR you can take these magic mushrooms, which could elevate your mood, produce altered states of consciousness, and enhance your experience of listening to music. Your choice.” Hm…now for the FDA approval… Author’s Note: I am not advocating the use of magic mushrooms to treat depression. As a psychologist who cannot prescribe medication, I often refer clients to the psychiatrists here in town. Unfortunately, we have a distinct shortage of psychiatrists in Ft. Collins, to the point that clients often have to wait anywhere from three weeks to three months to get an appointment. Many clients talk with me about the difficulties of psychiatric appointments. Often the chief complaint is how the psychiatrist doesn’t “listen” or have enough time to truly attend to the client. I get both sides. Clearly psychiatrists are doing a phenomenal job seeing so many patients in a town where psychiatric services are in high demand. They are very busy. On the other hand, clients often have a lot to discuss when it comes to medication, and they want more time than may be available. Enter KevinMD, “social media’s leading physician voice.” Kevin Pho, MD, runs a site where he helps patients “see what goes on behind the scenes of medicine.” Great blog, all in all. He recently published a guest post from a psychiatrist that is the inspiration of today’s Talk Therapy post: How to Be Heard by Your Psychiatrist. It’s certainly worth a read, and the comments below are interesting as well. It provides helpful hints for how a patient can best prep for a psychiatric appointment in order to get the most out of it. Does this mean that it’s all the client’s responsibility to guide their appointment? No, not at all. The psychiatrist must carry a significant portion of the weight and assume responsibility for structuring the appointment (logistically and interpersonally) in a way that is most beneficial to the patient. But just like in therapy, it’s very helpful when the client assumes some of that responsibility as well. I just read an interesting little article on using the iPhone to help with OCD symptoms, particularly checking behavior. Here’s a link to the article: http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-my-turn-iphone-ocd-20110627,0,2727205.story. The basic premise is that the author’s daughter used her iPhone to take pictures of things she typically needed to check several times (i.e., making sure the oven was off, making sure that the toaster was unplugged, etc.). Having pictures in the phone helped her know that each of these things was done, which allowed her to decrease her checking behavior. Pretty cool. Give it a look if you have a minute. Hello again, everyone. I know I’ve talked many times about the excuses for not posting more, but my last hiatus has been genuine. I mentioned in an earlier post that my wife and were expecting our first child, a boy, in September. Well, he has arrived! Three weeks early, on September 4. The last couple of months have been a whirlwind, to say the least. While the joys and anxieties of parenting can make for several volumes, I want to stick to the clinical piece here. Experiencing these emotions have given me a particular insight into my clients that I previously didn’t have. Now, I’ve had times in my life when I’ve dealt with what was probably clinical depression, and I struggled with panic attacks for two or three years (they do go away!), but nothing has compared to what I’ve felt over the last couple of months. I’m speaking particularly to the more desperate aspects…the fear that something is wrong with him, the anxiety and helplessness of not knowing how to soothe him, and the eventual transition of helplessness to unfounded anger at him, my wife, and parenting in general. Perhaps most interesting (and alarming), I’ve also experienced periods of bizarre, intrusive thoughts, not unlike those that come with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. With OCD, the thoughts can range from fairly benign (“I must turn the light on and off three times before leaving a room”) to pretty serious (“I am afraid I will kill someone if I drive my car”). They’re not rational, but they become strangely possible and real somehow. My own intrusive thoughts have revolved around inadvertently harming my son, again ranging from the benign (“What if I drop him?”) to the downright bizarre (“What if he jumps out of my arms and over the stair railing? I’d better hold him extra tight. But wait, what if I hold him so tight that I suffocate him or crush his head?”)…you get the idea. Dealing with these thoughts has helped greatly in understanding my clients’ experiences with OCD and anxiety, especially the fear that others will think you’re “crazy” if you talk about it. The first time I shared these thoughts with someone else, I thought for sure they’d bolt straight to the phone to call Child Protective Services. As it turned out, this person (a friend of mine with grown children) experienced very similar things. And she knew of others who did too. Maybe I’m not crazy after all. I suppose the lesson here is that we’re not alone in our emotional experiences. Chances are that if you’ve had a potentially embarrassing or troublesome thought or feeling, someone else has too. Sharing can be powerfully normalizing. Today’s post is a guest post from Ryan Rivera over at www.calmclinic.com, a website with tips and articles on managing anxiety. Enjoy!
14 Habits of Happy, Healthy, Calm Men Men are under a lot of pressure in today’s society. They are expected to perform above and beyond expectations, and valued on things like the money they bring, their ability to handle stress and “be manly,” their sexual prowess and so on. It is no wonder that so many men suffer from anxiety. Not only do men have constant pressure, but they are considered less masculine if they admit that the pressure is a problem. Instead they keep it bottled up inside, building up until it causes mental health problems in life. Men that want to live happy, healthy lives need to make sure they maintain habits that are known to keep men calm and content. Habits of Happy Men
Living as a Happy, Healthy Male For a man to be emotionally healthy, confident, and content with most situations, he doesn’t have to sacrifice himself. All he has to do is recognize his own emotions, accept how he feels, and do what it takes to make himself happy. All of his habits are focused on the idea that his happiness is important, and he should do what it takes to achieve that happiness and find pleasure and relaxation in life. About the Author: Ryan Rivera writes about anxiety, anxiety symptoms, and related issues on his website, www.calmclinic.com.
The article doesn’t do much in the way of making conclusions or suggestions, but it does serve to highlight the ways that exercise can impact a committed relationship. It primarily tells the story of an Ironman triathlete and his wife as they negotiate his lengthy workout routines, which take up to two hours on weekdays and five to six hours on Saturday and Sunday. He says, “It’s selfish,” while she notes that “…many wives in my position would have left.” In fact, he works out enough that his wife staged an “intervention” and enlisted other family members to help ask him to cut back. To be fair, the article does profile two other couples – one where both partners exercise together, and another where the husband is quite supportive of his wife’s frequent marathoning. So intense exercise doesn’t always have to come between couples. But the truth is that it sometimes does. I look at these situations through the Emotionally Focused framework, which is the approach that I use in seeing couples in my private practice. The approach looks closely at ways that couples either pursue or withdraw from one another in a continual “dance” of emotional closeness. In my experience, exercise can be a withdrawal mechanism, something that keeps one partner from fully connecting with the other. Taken to extremes, it falls in the same category as excessive drinking and affairs – an activity that inhibits couples from fully connecting with one another. What do y’all think? I welcome any comments on the post or stories of exercise’s role in relationships. I found a great series of posts on using mindfulness for addictive behaviors the other day at Dr. Elisha Goldstein’s blog. Well worth checking out the entire series, but I’d like to highlight a particular piece that really stuck out to me. Dr. Goldstein includes “urge surfing” in the skills needed to combat addictive behaviors using mindfulness. Urge surfing is a way to ride the “wave” of feelings that often come with addiction and other behaviors that we may not want to partake in but often do anyway. The way he describes it, the urge resembles a wave in that it starts small, builds in power or strength until a seemingly unbearable point, and then breaks as we either indulge in the behavior (often accompanied by a feeling of relief) or let it pass. I really like this description. Specifically, I like how it treats the urge not as a permanent state of unrest, but as a process that ebbs and flows. He says that most urges last only 20-30 minutes, tops. So if we can utilize these urge surfing strategies to get past this critical window of time, we can often overcome the urge itself…until it comes the next time I’ve been talking with my clients quite a bit about urge surfing in a variety of contexts. It’s not just for addictive behaviors, although those are great to practice with. Urge surfing can also come in handy when you’re debating that extra dessert or find yourself about to shoot off that angry email. If you have some time, give Dr. Goldstein’s post a read and try to apply it somewhere in your life this week. You may thank yourself later on Hello and Happy New Year to everyone! I hope that the holidays were a time to relax, rejuvenate, and connect with those close to you. It’s now been just over two months since my last post. You’d think that two months would be plenty of time to think of a few blog posts, but the truth is that I’ve slipped a bit. I think it’s due mostly to putting energy into my clinical work; my practice has grown rapidly, leaving me with much less time for writing. As I reflect on my work, I’m recognizing that I’ve fallen into a typical trap: the “all or nothing” game. You’ve probably heard of “all or nothing” or “black and white” thinking. Choices fall into one of two categories that often represent opposite ends of a continuum. Around this time of year, these could be dieting vs. not dieting, drinking vs. being on the wagon, exercising seven days a week vs. not exercising at all. The choices are usually based on fear as well: “If I don’t exercise every day, I’ll never get in shape.” For me, it’s been a case of “If I don’t work as many hours as humanly possible, my practice will surely shut down and fail,” or “If I don’t accept every new client that calls, I run the risk of never getting another new client in the future.” Logical, right? This trap inevitably sets us up for failure. In getting caught up in the extremes, we miss out on all the benefits and achievements along the way. I have a strong “Something is Better Than Nothing” policy that just happens to be supported by research I wish all of you the best in the upcoming year! |
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112 S. College Ave., Suite 200, Fort Collins, CO 80524 | (970) 420-7919 | dr.jeremysharp@gmail.com |
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A friend of mine (thanks, Tim) forwarded me an 
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