Recovery Michigan

Wednesday, September 07, 2016

I first knew my dad, Tom Frame, was different when I was young, but I didn't know exactly how. Every year when he marched in our Memorial Day Parade in Doylestown, Pa., I stood on the side of the road waving my tiny American flag with so much pride.

He was my dad, my veteran.

As a teenager, I began to learn about his time in Vietnam during the late 1960s. I heard about fallen men, fierce battles and something called post-traumatic stress disorder. I still didn't fully grasp at that time what my father was living with, and it wasn't until my late 20s that I was ready to dive into a project about my dad's PTSD.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that 30 percent of all Vietnam veterans have suffered from PTSD, and the effects can last many years.

When I began this project in 2014, I knew it would give me insight into my dad and his experiences in his early 20s, when he was fighting in Vietnam. I never anticipated the depth of understanding it would offer me into my mother and her life — standing by a veteran with deep-rooted trauma — and the role PTSD has played in their marriage.

America would never send a soldier to fight without basic training. Yet we have sent thousands of vets home unprepared to handle the devastating mental damages of war. Speaking while incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, former combat veteran Ron G. Self shares his personal struggle and outlines a plan to help our veterans.

Find out more about Ron's program Boot Camp Out and the amazing work of Veterans Healing Veterans from the Inside Out, a trauma recovery program for veterans who are at risk for suicide or incarceration.

You can donate here (http://veteranshealingveterans.org/do...) to support this work.
info@veteranshealingveterans.org

Learn more about San Quentin's exemplary Prison University Project, which was just awarded the National Humanities Medal, and is expanding to prisons throughout California.
https://prisonuniversityproject.org/

Interested in restorative justice? Check out http://www.insightprisonproject.org/v...

Ron G. Self, a former combat veteran of the United States Marine Corps who served from 1987 to 1996, is currently incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. While in prison, Self's personal struggles prompted him to found the self-help group Veterans Healing Veterans From The Inside Out to try to stop the alarmingly high suicide rate among veterans.

At San Quentin, Self works as the Prisoner Liaison for the Veterans Information Projec to ensure that San Quentin’s incarcerated veterans population has access to all eligible services. A strong advocate for restorative justice, Self also facilitates two Victim Offender Education Groups (VOEG) as well as a VOEG Next Step group.

Paws and Stripes is a nonprofit​​​​​​​​​ organization providing service dogs​​​​​​​​​​ for wounded military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury through integrating service dog training and education with mental health support.​

​We help veterans​​​​​​​​​​ so they can live the full and rich lives​​​​​​​​​​they deserve.​

Our dogs come only from local rescues​​​​​​​​​​. Our service dog trainers​​​​​​​​​​ teach the dogs and the veterans as a team​​​​​​​​​​.​

These dogs are not pets, they are service dogs with the complete protection and rights granted by the American with Disabilities Act.​

Our program is funded through generous grants and donations​​​​​​​​​​ from people like you. Our veterans are never obligated to pay​​​​​​​​​​ a penny​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ of the program's costs to enroll.

Traumatic stress affects the brains of adolescent boys and girls differently, according to a new brain-scanning study from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Among youth with post-traumatic stress disorder, the study found structural differences between the sexes in one part of the insula, a brain region that detects cues from the body and processes emotions and empathy. The insula helps to integrate one’s feelings, actions and several other brain functions.

Among young people who are exposed to traumatic stress, some develop PTSD while others do not. People with PTSD may experience flashbacks of traumatic events; may avoid places, people and things that remind them of the trauma; and may suffer a variety of other problems, including social withdrawal and difficulty sleeping or concentrating. Prior research has shown that girls who experienced trauma are more likely to develop PTSD than boys who experience trauma, but scientists have been unable to determine why.

The researchers saw no differences in brain structure between boys and girls in the control group. However, among the traumatized boys and girls, they saw differences in a portion of the insula called the anterior circular sulcus. This brain region had larger volume and surface area in traumatized boys than in boys in the control group. In addition, the region’s volume and surface area were smaller in girls with trauma than among girls in the control group.

The insula normally changes during childhood and adolescence, with smaller insula volume typically seen as children and teenagers grow older. Thus, the findings imply that traumatic stress could contribute to accelerated cortical aging of the insula in girls who develop PTSD, Klabunde said.

“There are some studies suggesting that high levels of stress could contribute to early puberty in girls,” she said.

The researchers also noted that their work may help scientists understand how experiencing trauma could play into differences between the sexes in regulating emotions. “By better understanding sex differences in a region of the brain involved in emotion processing, clinicians and scientists may be able to develop sex-specific trauma and emotion dysregulation treatments,” the authors write in the study.

Everyone worries, but some people worry more than others. When worry is excessive, people may develop generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). In fact, close to a quarter of people who go to their primary care physicians with anxiety suffer from this.

In general, stressful events in childhood and adulthood, having strained economic resources, being divorced, and being female all put you at risk for GAD. But what do all of these different high-risk groups have in common psychologically? Why do they worry so much? And what can they do about this?

A recent study explained why people with GAD worry so much — and the findings may surprise you. While many people think they are just worriers, they do not realize that they actually worry for a reason. Their worry is an attempt to protect themselves! If you’re wondering how such a nagging, persistent, annoying, and sometimes distressing psychological state can be helpful, you’re probably not alone. But the findings do in fact make some sense.

It turns out that worrying about something puts your mind into a negative state, but this helps, because when something negative does happen, you don’t feel that much worse. You’ve already been feeling bad. For people with GAD, it’s better to feel bad most of the time so that a negative event — someone being ill, sudden financial challenges, or rejection from a loved one — doesn’t have the power to create a massive emotional swing. It’s the sudden shift from a neutral or positive mood to a negative one that is of great concern to worriers. They will do anything to avoid this, include preparing to be miserable. They really hate the contrast of a situation unexpectedly going south. To people who aren’t worriers, this would sound counterintuitive, but they don’t have the same sensitivity to sudden emotional shifts. In fact, for them, worry is undesirable, whereas worriers find worry helpful.

As challenging as this sounds, there are things that you can do to retrain your brain to stop worrying. Cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of talk therapy where you simply revisit your assumptions in an attempt to reframe your thoughts, works according to some studies but not others.

It’s important to remember that you can benefit from other forms of talk therapy, though, and that you can benefit from medications as well. But if you want to try changing the way you think right now, prior to therapy or while you’re waiting, you might consider the following approach.

Rather than challenging yourself or someone else about worry, you can actually accept that the worry is serving a purpose — to avoid a sudden negative swing. Then, start to delve deeper so you can discover that the negative swing is probably less negative than you think. Giving up the struggle and control with worry, and accepting that it has not been helpful, is the next step. You can then re-examine your library of negative “proof” and swap out threatening realities for positive ones. In fact, this kind of deliberate optimism can protect you from GAD.

In the past decade, "self-harm" has been the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths in Colorado, a new study finds.

Of all 211 maternal deaths in Colorado between 2004 and 2012, 30 percent were attributed to self-harm. That included suicides and drug overdoses -- most often in the year after a woman gave birth.

Self-harm was the most common cause of maternal deaths -- ahead of car accidents, medical conditions and homicide, the researchers said.

It's not clear whether self-harm deaths are becoming more common, said lead researcher Dr. Torri Metz, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Denver Health Medical Center.

Nor is it known whether other U.S. states are showing the same pattern, she said.

But the results underscore the importance of screening pregnant women for depression, according to Metz.

Guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) say that all women should be screened at least once for "perinatal" depression -- symptoms that occur during pregnancy or in the first year after a woman gives birth.

But it's not clear how often that actually happens in the real world, Metz said.

To listen to a recording:

1. phone 712-770-4019,
2. when prompted for an access code enter 735-129#,
3. when prompted for a reference number enter the reference number given below for the desired call followed by “#” (e.g., 2# for the June 2016 call), or “#” alone for the most recent call.

June 2016 Call, Reference Number 2

We hosted a public conference about Housing for MCS people on Tuesday, June 21st, 2016.

We had a presentation about buying land in Canada, by someone who is looking for a land buying partner, or intentional neighbor in Canada.

There was a presentation about yurts as MCS housing by someone looking for land or community in Montana.

We also had a section on how to find safer housing, including a list of current housing ad venues.

We then had an update from the Canary Housing Cooperative in New York State. http://canaryhousingcooperative.org

May 2016 Call, Reference Number 1

MCS Friends hosted a public conference call May 17th, 2016 on the topic of applying for Social Security Disability. We had presentations by staff members of Allsup who are aware of MCS. They spoke for about 25 minutes and then took questions from the audience. One of our members recently was successful in applying for SSD, but choose not share details.

Here are some links to background information on Allsup’s website:

SSDI Literacy/SSDI Benefits,

SSDI fact sheet,

General SSDI guidelines.

There is also a new recent recording that will be posted soon on safe housing.