Mark Myers Expert Answer to: What is the best way to help a friend who is suffering from professional burnout

The first step is trying to educate him that he/she is experiencing "burn out." Does your friend

identify feeling burnout. Some of the classic symptoms include: feeling a loss of control over work environment, dreading going to work, anxiety over work situation, negative attitude about work, working long hours and still not feeling caught up, feeling unappreciated, and talking about work in a negative context. This could personally impact on someone in the following ways: sleep difficulties, anxiety, feeling hopeless, depression, family relations, personal relations, and even physical symptoms.

Siblings & Autism: How Are Kids Affected by Special Needs Brothers & Sisters

It's a question that not everyone asks or even thinks about, unless you are the parent to more

than child and especially if you are a parent of a child with special needs and a child/children with no special needs.

How are your other children affected by your aspergers child?

An estimated five million "developing" Canadian children have siblings with some type of disorder (eg., ADHD, Austism Spectrum Disorder, Cerebral Palsy, Downs, Depression), and often these children can feel left out, pushed behind the parental wall while parents focus on the child with special needs, and left feeling empty, alone and un-loved.

When Trace was born, JJ was seven years old. He was so excited to have a little brother. Heck, he was excited just to have a sibling that belonged to him. He had dreams and plans, things he wanted to do with his brother, how he wanted to be a big brother and dreams for the future of their relationship.

Results versus Process

Individuals making important decisions in life at times could find themselves immobilized but focusing too much on end results. While possible outcomes are helpful to look at when making a big decision, we need to remember there are many intangibles involved that impact on the actual results.

An example of this would be a wife of an alcoholic decides to divorce her husband after many unsuccessful years of trying to get him to stop drinking. After the divorce he could choose to remarry and stop drinking. This does not mean she made the wrong decision. At the time she choose to take an action based on information she had at her disposal, such as, years he was drinking, repeated requests to stop, financial and emotional resources that were effected by his drinking, and where she was at emotionally.

If we look back or evaluate the process involved in making a decision we are choosing NOT to making ourselves responsible for other peoples actions. We cannot control outcomes but can control ourselves. The effort and thought in making a decision is more important than the results.

Mark Myers Expert Answer to:What sort of hacks can I use to snap out of depression?

What sort of hacks can I use to snap out of depression? I've been diagnosed with depression, but don't want to take medication.

Depending on the severity, the length of time it has been going on, and the impact it is having on your life, there are different ways someone can address feeling depressed. The first step is learning more about your depression. Try to determine patterns to your depression. Is it more intense during certain times of the day, talking with certain people, or thinking certain thoughts? Are some days better than other days? Is it more intense during certain times of the year? How long does it last when you are depressed? Keeping a journal would be one way to help determine patterns.

This information gathering is going to be helpful. If you feel depressed more during Winter time(for most people in general this is common to some degree), this may suggest a possibility of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Interventions could include increasing activities, buying a light therapy lamp, or increasing excercise routine.

While gathering information you may also see a pattern to how you think. Are you looking at situations pessimistically? Are you feeling lonely? Are you feeling depressed because of certain relationships or lack there of? How are you sleeping and does lack of sleep impact on your emotions? If you see a point of origin to your depression, you can implement a plan of action to address this.

Some strategies could include: increase/include exercise, vitamins, increase social networks, hypnosis, volunteer, join support group, involve yourself in religious activities or organisations, or changing your way of thinking. Medication does not have to be involved, but in some cases it is necessary. Talk therapy could also be introduced. A therapist could help you in planning out a course of action.

Mark Myers expert answer to: Why do so many children and young people feel fear, powerlessness, anger and/or disgust towards school?

I am not sure there are studies that would support your belief that most children feel fear, powerlessness, anger,and disgust towards school. These are intense emotions that you are describing. I see through my practice, children feeling anger toward going to school but that does not mean they are angry at the school system itself. As a rule, children/youth are very self focused and do not have the ability to plan or look ahead. They are very attune to the here and now. Asking them to participate in an activity that requires effort and structure, is something that goes against their developmental write up.

What to Expect When You Have ADHD Kids | ADHD Mom Blog

Have you ever thought, "I give this child my all. I have nothing left for myself, my spouse, or my other child(ren)," or, "I worry about my child’s future constantly"?

Do you wish someone had written -- and you'd read -- a guide called What to Expect When You're (Not) Expecting a Special Needs Child to help prepare you for your child's challenges? If so, you're not alone.

As I mentioned in my last post, I coedited a book aimed at bridging the gap between parents of “Easy to Love but Hard to Raise” children, those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD), learning disabilities (LD), sensory processing disorder (SPD), or other alphabet soup conditions that take the already difficult job of parenting and add to the challenge.

FAMILY LIFELINES: Handling parenting stress

We are all living with stress in our lives. Stress is the reaction we have to a situation presented to us. We need some stress in our lives. Positive stress is what gets us up and going every day. Some stress works positively for us by providing the extra energy to help us work through our ...

How meditation relieves the subjective experience of pain

Meditation can relieve pain, and it does so by activating multiple brain areas, according to an April study in the Journal of Neuroscience. Fadel Zeidan of Wake Forest University and his colleagues scanned people’s brains as they received uncomfortably hot touches to the leg. When subjects practiced a mindful meditation technique that encourages detachment from experience while focusing on breathing, they reported less pain than when they simply paid attention to their breathing.

Helping Visual, Auditory, and Tactile ADHD Learners

Each child has his or her own learning style — a unique way of taking in and processing

information. Most kids – especially ADHD students – use all of their five senses for learning, but often favor one sense over the others.

"Visual learners" prefer reading or observing. "Auditory learners" do best with talking and listening. "Tactile/kinesthetic learners" benefit most from a hands-on approach.

Mark Myers Expert Answer to: Why is criticism considered with negative connotations?

Why is criticism considered with negative connotations?
Edit
Criticism appears to be the greatest gift one may bestow upon another if the other is truly interested in growing and discovering a heightened self-awareness.

It appears that people frequently take things personally and leave situations gravely offended rather than thankful that someone has brought new light to an issue:

Twelve bullying myths

Myths and misconceptions
Not a day goes by without another gut-wrenching tale of bullying making headlines. Schoolyards erupt in violence. Social-media sites turn into cyber lynch mobs. Kids commit suicide after enduring months of abuse. Despite all the media attention, parents often remain in the dark about what actions to take when it happens to their children — or when their children bully others.

Steroid use increasing in athletic community

Anabolic steroids are familiar to many of us as the synthetic substances used by some athletes to help promote the growth of skeletal muscle. There are now more than 100 different kinds of anabolic steroids, all of which require a prescription to be used legally in the United States. Those who would use and/or distribute them illegally have been able to obtain these steroids by smuggling them into the country from foreign sources, synthesizing them in underground laboratories, or by stealing or diverting them from pharmacies. Unfortunately, the illegal use of these drugs has grown into a huge issue, especially in the athletic community.

Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Decide Before You Decide

When we make a decision, we are, in fact, deciding. It’s plain common sense. The definition of a decision. A tautology if ever there was one. Right? Actually, wrong. While it may indeed seem a commonsensical tautology, the truth is that we often decide long before we’re making a decision: our preconceptions, biases, behavioral habits and usual ways of acting have long since decided for us.

The Ways We Talk About Pain

The experience forced me to think about our relationship to pain—not chronic pain, but acute

experiences: how much of it we think we’re allowed to feel, how much of it that we express, and how we’re supposed to respond when we’re hurt. None of us are immune to physical pain. At the very least, we’ve all likely stubbed a toe or scraped a knee at some point. Some of us have broken bones. And we’ve probably had some degree of headache. However, for each of these scenarios there is a particular response. If you stub your toe, for example, and behave as though you’ve broken your leg, you’ll likely be met with skepticism about the magnitude of pain you claim to feel. And if you persistently do this, your reputation may lead toward dramatic or hyperbole.

The Hedonic Nose: Pleasure May Organize Your Sense of Smell

The nose has long been viewed as a disorganized sensory organ, its odor receptors strewn about with very little rhyme or reason. A study in Nature Neuroscience, published online September 25, challenges that notion. It suggests that odor receptors are grouped by the pleasantness of the odors they detect.

Speech Disorders May Be Helped Using Rhythm and Familiar Words

Singing therapy is often used to restore fluency to sufferers of speech disorders due to stroke. Recent research found, however, it may not be the singing itself that helps. Christie Nicholson reports

Depressed Patients May Process Hate Feelings Differently

Depressed Patients May Process Hate Feelings Differently
Activity in the brain's "hate circuit" is out of sync across the circuit's three regions, leading to self-loathing and other failures to deal appropriately with feelings of hate, research suggests.

History and the Decline of Human Violence

History and the Decline of Human Violence. In a magisterial new book, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that humanity's ‘better angels’ are triumphing

Mark Myers expert Answer to: What are the best ways to convince other people that "negative" incidents from your past won't be relevant for your future?

Responses to this question may differ depending on the people and the negative incident(s) from your past. If the incident was of a grievous nature, for some they may never get past it. Even if the incident(s) was not significant, some individuals have a difficult time moving past impressions they have of other people.

Out of the Darkness, Suicide Awareness and Prevention

Standing in a sea of people preparing for the Out of the Darkness Walk for R.I.T.A. is a women holding a board with pictures of a young man who should now be in the prime of his life.
“He didn’t realize how special he was, and how many people cared about him. We’re walking in his memory in hopes that others will know there is always someone they can reach out to,” said Rena Charboneau.
Daniel, a family friend, ended his life at the age of 18. And like the 1,000 other walkers that raised just under $100,000 at the morning’s awareness and fundraising event, Team Daniel hopes their efforts may inspire others to make the outreach effort Daniel ultimately did not.
“We need to talk about suicide, about behaviors that warn us that someone is considering it. We need to realize mental illnesses have treatments that work, and that no one should feel shame in needing help,” said Lisa Riley, co-chair of the walk and president of the capitol region chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

What do parents really need to know about bullying? It's not necessarily what you think.

You'll know when your child is being bullied. Just because your child doesn’t tell you he or she is being bullied doesn’t mean it’s not happening. In 2007 almost a third of middle and high schoolers reported that they’d been bullied at school. And those are the ones who admitted it. “It’s one of those silent issues,” Williams says. Many kids don’t speak up because they think that it will lead to more abuse, because they’re ashamed, and because of the powerful unwritten code against snitching.