All Posts Tagged as 'Mental Health'

It’s a lesson in reading, writing and reefer.

Florida moms and dads have been spotted smoking weed, drinking and walking around half-naked in the background of their kids’ online classes, frustrated teachers said at a school board meeting.

“Parents, please make sure that you have on proper clothing when you are walking behind your child’s computer because we’ve seen them in their drawers, their bras, and everything else,” Boca Raton Elementary teacher Edith Pride vented Wednesday, according to KATV.

The two-part assignment was given to seniors in an English class at W.T. White High School, the Dallas Independent School District (ISD) confirmed to CNN.

The first part of the assignment asked students to write a half-page biography for six people, among them 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse.

The others on the list were Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, George Floyd and Joseph Rosenbaum, one of the victims of the Kenosha shooting. The names of Gandhi and Malcolm X were misspelled, according to a photo of the assignment obtained by CNN affiliate KTVT.

In the second part of the assignment, students were then asked to write a one-page essay on which of those six people they believed best demonstrated the concept of a hero.

I masturbate almost every day. If I’m bored or feel the urge, I will do it a couple of times a day. I figure if masturbation is so healthy, then I’ll be damned if I’m going to deny myself a dose of healthiness. And yet, while I do masturbate regularly, there have been times in my life when I haven’t. Extended periods of time, to be exact.

Week Two:
Although I never think I'm going to get agitated from sexual frustration, it does happen. During week two, the slightest thing gets on my nerves. I’m also antsy — like I have an itch I need to scratch, but just can’t. In fact, it’s not just that I can’t scratch it, but it also feels like I’m not even sure where that itch is.

While I know what’s causing the agitated itchiness and can recognize how to remedy the “issue,” I still don’t masturbate (because I'm at my parents' house). Then I get angry at myself for not giving into the urge and slipping away somewhere private. Instead, I spend time wondering why I have this hangup, and getting even more annoyed at myself.

Also, I write about sex! I tell myself I should be able to masturbate whenever I need to, and be totally cool with it! Yea, there's a lot of mental chastising going on at this point.

A mother's depression and anxiety from conception through the first year of the baby's life is associated with negative developmental outcomes through adolescence, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

That could affect a lot of women: About 15% to 23% of women worldwide experience anxiety during pregnancy, while 15% deal with anxiety after childbirth. Depression through pregnancy is estimated to affect 10% of women, and 15% face postpartum depression. The burden is greater for women who are experiencing poverty or are teen parents, according to Postpartum Support International.

For the baby, the perinatal stage — which is defined as the time from conception through pregnancy (antenatal), birth and the first year of the baby's life (postnatal) — is "a time of unprecedented growth and sensitivity," the study said. That's when exposures and early life experiences may modify development starting from when he or she is in the womb to that critical first year as a growing child and onward.

A mother experiencing depression and anxiety before and after birth was moderately linked with her child's deficits in language and cognitive and motor development in infancy.

The disruption to schools caused by the coronavirus pandemic constitutes a “global education emergency” that threatens to derail the education of at least 24 million students projected to drop out of school as a result, said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“At the height of Covid-19,” 192 countries shuttered schools, leaving 1.6 billion students without in-person learning, Fore said on a press call hosted by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She added that now, more than 870 million students, “or half the world’s student population in 51 countries,” are still unable to return to school.

“The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return,” she said. “That’s why we are urging governments to prioritize reopening schools when restrictions are lifted.”

She added that beyond education, schools around the world provide many students with a source of nutrition and immunizations.

“At least 24 million children are projected to drop out of school due to Covid-19,” she said.

People often throw the phrase "obsessive-compulsive disorder" (OCD) around as jokey shorthand for being excessively particular or high-strung, casting the disorder as a sort of innocuous, yet desexualizing, set of anxieties.

But OCD isn’t a quirk. It's a mental health condition that more than 2 percent of people experience at some point. It takes the random thoughts that flash through people's heads—that irrational fear of having done something wrong, or an unbidden, bizarre fantasy—and, instead of allowing them to quickly fade, forces them to the forefront of their minds in distressing spirals. Because these obsessions don’t respond well to reason, people with OCD develop rituals in an attempt to bring themselves relief from those anxieties. But that relief is fleeting, and people get stuck in this cycle of obsession and ritual. Many become dependent on a growing list of compulsions, which can become their own sources of anxiety and shame.

Obsessions and rituals can bleed directly into sex, as well. People with contamination obsessions often talk about fixating on the perceived dirtiness of genitals or bodily fluids and putting up hard limits on how they have sex. By some estimates, at least one in 10 people with OCD will also at some point develop obsessions about sex, constantly questioning their sexualities or worrying they might be developing harmful urges and building rituals into their relationships, their masturbation habits, their engagement with porn, to test or reassure themselves about their desires. Fears of being misunderstood—or actually dangerous—force some people with sexual obsessions to avoid intimacy altogether. Often, current or potential romantic partners who face the realities of OCD write those with the condition off as just too much.

Dear How to Do It,

My boyfriend of just under a year, “Tom” is pansexual, which has never been a problem (I’m a straight woman, FYI). However, the night we met he told me that he had recently hooked up with a straight male friend, “Brandon,” and then been rejected, and this situation in particular is an issue. It is obvious that Tom has a huge crush on Brandon. Tom has said on a few occasions that he was ready to come out to his religious parents for Brandon and was hoping to be his boyfriend, but Brandon told him that the sex was a one-time thing and asked him not to tell anyone (a request which he obviously did not honor). Instead of backing off, Tom will text Brandon to join our group at any outing unless I expressly ask him not to by saying that I would like tonight to be just us, or that our friends have invited only us out. When Tom does invite Brandon places, Brandon often does not respond or responds hours later vaguely. Once, Tom said that he wanted to use my phone to call Brandon because he thought he’d actually get him to pick up by using a number not his own that Brandon didn’t recognize. If we pass a bar that Brandon is known to frequent regularly, Tom likes to stop in to see if he’s there, and will want to hang out if Brandon is there. He also repeatedly violates Brandon’s request to keep their hook up under wraps. He’s told many people, not just me. The one time he did get Brandon to hang out, Tom pissed me off by staying out hours after he told me he was coming back, letting his phone die so that I couldn’t reach him, and then waking me up at 3:30 in the morning to let him in because he didn’t have his keys. He’s also lately been floating the idea of Brandon joining us in a threesome, because I have expressed interest in us finding a male partner for one and wants me to spend one on one time with Brandon as a start to getting him home with us. At this point, I think I’m about ready to throw in the towel and let Tom chase this man and implode their friendship unencumbered by a relationship with me. What do you think?

—Brandon Blues

Q. My boyfriend is in a co-dependent relationship with his sister: My good friend “Mary” set me up with her brother “Jim” in January, when he moved in with her from out of state. We’ve been dating ever since. While Mary was happy for us, she was sad to not have a partner herself. So when Jim told me in March that he was going to prioritize her feelings because she was having a hard time, I understood. (By that time we were a “pod” of three, and being the third wheel can be rough.) Initially, their close sibling friendship seemed nice. But then Mary got possessive. She told me privately that they had fulfilled the emotional role of romantic partners for each other for years. She said she saw me as “the other woman.” At one point Mary asked Jim to stop texting me in the evenings so he could be more “present” when he was with her. Jim agreed that her behavior was unreasonable but said he didn’t want to change too much because Mary was struggling emotionally. Mary is in therapy and told me recently that we both need to stop making Jim “responsible” for our feelings. But I don’t think I have! I felt hurt and unsupported in the spring. I want to be compassionate toward Mary. But I suspect she and my boyfriend are co-dependent, and I want it to stop. What should I do? Or am I being selfish and I need to work on being empathetic toward my friend, who is lonely, and her brother, who is trying to support her?

Vinnie, 55, admitted he has struggled since his wife Tanya, 53, died last year from cancer.

He told the BBC Headliners podcast: “I hate this word mental health because I think it scares blokes — especially around my age because you’re a bit old school.

“I just don’t like, ‘Oh I’ve got mental health problems’.

"People stand back even now — ‘Oh really, what kind?’, ‘Well mine’s grief’, ‘That’s all right then, you’re not an axe murderer’.

"So I think that's quite a hard thing for blokes especially to say, 'I've got mental health problems, I'm seeing a psychologist'."

Many families are plagued by narcissism. I use the word plague because it feels like a disease, running through the veins of the tenuous connections between the various family members. When you're part of a narcissistic family, the effects it has are devastating. In fact, there will be times that you feel as if the life is being sucked out of you.

I choose to have people in my life who respect my boundaries. As soon as I'm involved with a narcissist, I find it very hard to defend my boundaries - even when I have a clear idea of what's right and wrong. That's because narcissists have no respect whatsoever for boundaries. They invade. The ignore your right to privacy, activities and opinions which differ from their own. Not being listened to or respected is exhausting.

Narcissists never, ever feel that enough is enough. They always want more attention. They always want to create more chaos between people around them. They want more and more from you. Make friends with a narcissist and they'll want you to be their best friend. Tell them a private secret once and they'll feel upset if you don't share every intimate aspect of your life from then on. You cannot ever satisfy a narcissist's needs - but you can keel over with exhaustion in the process of trying.

The rate of suicide among those aged 10 to 24 increased nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rise occurred in most states, with 42 experiencing significant increases.

"It's a real trend that has been demanding, for a while, a serious public health and research effort to understand what is happening and why," said Anna Mueller, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington who studies suicides in adolescents. "I don't buy that it's just social media, which is one of the explanations that I most consistently see."

"We absolutely need to be really careful to not think about suicide as just a white kid problem," Mueller said. "It's absolutely not. Kids across racial and ethnic groups and sexual orientations experience suicidal thoughts, and even attempt at significant rates."

But Mueller cautioned not to lose sight of the fact that suicidal thoughts are not uncommon, especially among young people.

For the first time since 2000, the official guidance on relationships and sex education (RSE) in England is changing. From this month, RSE is mandatory in every secondary school, regardless of whether they are state or private (though the Government has said it will make allowances for schools as yet unable to implement the change because of the coronavirus crisis).

Relationships education – which is now compulsory in every primary school – will mainly deal with families and friendships. It will cover the risks of online relationships, digital privacy, physical boundaries and recognising abusive behaviour.

But will the new guidance protect and empower young people for sex and relationships in a modern world?“The curriculum puts the physical health and emotional wellbeing of young people at its core,” Chiquita Henson, headteacher of Cirencester Deer Park School, a secondary school in Gloucestershire, tells i.

Marijuana use is on the rise among baby boomers in the United States, especially men, according to a study published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The findings appear to reflect changing attitudes toward cannabis across the country, study co-author Bill Jesdale, an assistant professor of population and quantitative health science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worchester, suggested.

Use of the drug increased in older adults in both the states where marijuana has been legalized for recreational use and in the states where it has not, he said. “It seems that something has happened to the country as a whole.”

DEAR ABBY: Although he has never hit me, my husband has been emotionally and verbally abusive ever since our wedding five years ago. One of his favorite names for me when he’s angry is “Fuckin’ Bitch.” I know this is my fault because I have tolerated it.

Today, my 2½-year-old daughter (who is usually a good girl) threw a tantrum and called me the same name twice. I try to discipline her, but she doesn’t understand that she’s saying something bad if Daddy can call me that. How can she?

He blames me for her talking that way, saying he hasn’t called me that in a month. (He called me that last week. I don’t use that language.)

I have suggested marriage counseling in the past, but he refused. I can’t leave him because I am seven months pregnant with our second child. How do I get both of them to respect me?

DISRESPECTED IN THE EAST