The Approval Trap: How to Ditch the Fear You Didn’t Know You Had So You Can Find Your Inner Authority

When my daughter was two years old, she loved to draw. The funny thing is, she never asked me if it was okay to draw on the walls. She assumed it was fine. White wall, colorful crayons, good idea. She had inner authority: she didn’t stress about it; she knew just what she liked. She never second guessed herself, wondering if she was good enough. She certainly didn’t wonder if she was smart enough, attractive enough, or funny enough. She assumed that she was all of these things and more, and most importantly, she was undeterred in accomplishing whatever she set her mind to.

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The Davis Autism Approach

Disclaimer: This Blog is posted for interest only; this post does not advocate any particular treatment.

Within the Davis Autism Approach, in our aim for simplicity, we have chosen to use ‘Autism’ as the umbrella term for Autism, Asperger Syndrome (AS), High Functioning Autism (HFA) or Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). We hope this is acceptable to you.

The Davis Autism Approach is a non-invasive, gentle approach designed to allow autistic individuals to participate more fully in life. 

This one-on-one program can be conducted by a Davis Autism Approach Facilitator or by a parent or loved one who can be trained and mentored by a Davis Autism Facilitator-Coach.

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Can Autism be cured

Disclaimer: This Blog is posted for interest only; this post does not advocate any particular treatment.

Things are heating up. Last week I posted Vaccines DO Cause Autism, but That’s Not The Point, and things got ugly. But I’m not going to stop there. It’s the month where everyone lights it up blue… and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think we need to focus on more than blue lights. We should be asking the question: can autism be cured?

According to many of your recent comments, autism cannot be cured. You say that autism is a genetic, neurological disorder that some children are born with.

Well, I hate to disagree… but, I disagree.

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Psychiatric nurses threaten strike over staffing shortages

The Psychiatric Nurses Association is to vote on proposals for industrial action over staffing shortages in the profession.

Delegates at the association’s annual conference in Co Cavan voted to put a proposal for a ballot on industrial action to a special executive council meeting next month.

The union says up to 1,000 new nurses are needed to fill 600 current vacancies and to replace retiring staff across the mental health services.

General secretary Des Kavanagh said the association could not trust the HSE to guarantee a proper nursing workforce was in place. Nurses had no faith that the strategies being pursued by the HSE to recruit and train nurses would meet the “chronic shortages” faced in the coming years, he said.

More from the Irish Times

Permission granted for national children's hospital

An Bord Pleanála has granted planning permission for the new children's hospital on a campus shared with St James's Hospital in Dublin.

The project will bring together the three existing children's hospitals - Temple Street Children's University Hospital, Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin and the National Children's Hospital, Tallaght.

There has been much controversy of the suitability of the site

Read more from RTE

Meet Your Second Brain: The Gut

Most of us can relate to the experience of having butterflies in our stomach, or to a visceral gut-wrenching feeling, and how often are we told not to ignore our “gut-instinct” or “gut-feeling” when making a decision.
Even from our simple slang, it’s clear just how symbolically connected the gut is to our emotions. Now, there’s tangible proof to support these popular metaphors.
We all have a microbiome, and they are as unique as our neural pathways
Research has shown that the body is actually composed of more bacteria than cells. We are more bug than human! Collectively, these trillions of bacteria are called the microbiome. Most of those bacteria reside in our gut, sometimes referred to as the gut microbiota, and they play multiple roles in our overall health.
The gut is no longer seen as an entity with the sole purpose of helping with all aspects of digestion. It’s also being considered as a key player in regulating inflammation and immunity.
Read more from mindful.org

The Cancer Whisperer

Perhaps the only dreams that die are the ones that come true. They cease to exist in the very instant that they pass from imagination to reality. Until then they live on in the recesses of your mind,veiled by disappointment and hopelessness, like old love letters tied up in red ribbon and left in an antique box in the attic. Forgotten and unfulfilled.

Sometimes it can take a near-catastrophe to pull your dreams back into the forefront of your consciousness and convince you to dust off all the reasons you abandoned them. Sometimes you need to teeter on the rim of death to put them back into play.

I wrote The Cancer Whisperer last summer because cancer had dropped my neglected dream of being an author into my arms like a newborn baby, wide-eyed and irresistible, demanding my complete attention. I barely had a choice in the matter. It just wanted out.

Read more on the website Sophie Sabbage: the Cancer Whisperer

5 Truths Only Depressives Understand & How to Fight Back

There are some things that only depressives understand. It’s hard to describe to people who have never experienced it before and most of the time too painful.

But today, I’m going to try.

As someone with clinical depression, I fight these truths on a cycling basis. After years of healing and proactive recovery, I’ve grown to be a pro at pulling myself back out of the darkness. As strong as I’ve gotten, however, I still get hit with these issues when I least expect it.

It’s a battle to open up about what we’re feeling or thinking because a part of us believes our distortions are true. To say it out loud would surely break us.

I’ve learned that by letting the people I love in, I give myself permission to heal, and so do you. We get nowhere with silence.

Depression isn’t something to grit your teeth and bear; it’s a malady only love will heal. [tweet it]

It’s my hope that sharing these truths with you, the depressed or the compassionate, will either help you feel less alone or better understand a loved one in your life who can’t speak up yet. Below each truth, I offer how I fight back against the distortions, and also how you as a supporter might be able to support someone who’s going through a low point.

Here are the 5 truths only depressives understand (and how to fight back).

Read more from the blog 'Strong inside out'

Newly published charter of rights for people with dementia

Former president Mary Robinson has said a newly published charter of rights for people with dementia would help society view the condition in a new light.

Ireland’s first such document is the culmination of work carried out by the Irish Dementia Working Group and the Alzheimer Society of Ireland (ASI).

The Charter of Rights for People with Dementia stresses the need for a parity of rights for the 48,000 people estimated to have the condition in Ireland.

Specifically, it highlights policy gaps in the areas of stigma and the “inadequate and inappropriate” nature of services.

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Remedies for Your Anxious Mind

This week's theme: Soothing an anxious mind.

When you're antsy, jumpy, or feeling anxious, a walking meditation can be the best thing to help transfer all of that inner movement into focused attention.

Sometimes, simply pausing, taking five deep breaths, expanding the inbreath and slowing the outbreath, can steady us, and give us a moment of open awareness.

One of the best ways to soothe the nerves is to find other people to be with and talk to, which is how we discover that most people feel anxious to some degree—it isn't just happening to us.

Here’s hoping you all find moments to enjoy being mindful this week

Taken from Mindful Newletter extract

Three Simple Mindfulness Practices You Can Use Every Day

Every minute of our lives serves up something new and gives us an opportunity to learn. But when it comes to the usual ways of learning—reading, writing, and listening to others—we often lose the freshness of direct experience and instead just shovel information into our brains. Mirabai Bush suggests how to learn more deeply and with more enjoyment.

Read More from Mindfulness.org

Study could help tackle memory loss associated with conditions such as Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia

Our brains can act the same way as email by filing irrelevant thoughts into a neurological trash folder.
Forgetting memories can be the result of an active deletion process rather than a failure to remember, according to new research.
The findings point towards new ways of tackling memory loss associated with conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.
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The Lancet: We now live in a world in which more people are obese than underweight, major global analysis reveals

• By 2025, around a fifth of adults worldwide will be obese
• Over a third of UK men and women, and over 40% of US men and women will be obese by 2025.
  
• Interactive maps and country by country data available below

In the past 40 years, there has been a startling increase in the number of obese people worldwide--rising from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014, according to the most comprehensive analysis of trends in body mass index (BMI) to date, published in The Lancet.
The age-corrected proportion of obese men has more than tripled (3.2% to 10.8%), and the proportion of obese women has more than doubled (6.4% to 14.9%) since 1975. At the same time, the proportion of underweight people fell more modestly--by around a third in both men (13.8% to 8.8%) and women (14.6% to 9.7%).

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10 Old-School Nursing Skills You Don’t See Anymore

Nursing, along with the rest of the medical field, is constantly evolving to ensure better patient outcomes. Nursing skills, in particular, have changed quite a bit over the last several decades. Some skills have even been discarded completely for the sake of safety or efficiency. Here are 10 interesting examples of old-school nursing skills that have either drastically changed or are no longer practiced:

1. Reusing syringes and urinary catheter

Read More at Scrubs Blog

The Role of Nurses in Increasing Health Literacy

As nurses, we tend to take for granted how much our patients know about their own health conditions. The truth is, many don’t know much, and by overestimating their health literacy we are hindering their road to a recovery. With new standards in health care going into effect that entail more patient involvement in their own treatment, it is imperative that nurses learn how to properly assess health literacy.

What is Health Literacy?

In most cases, a patient ultimately has the final say in how they are treated medically. Even routine procedures are not first performed without their consent. While this measure seemingly protects their rights, it could hinder their recovery if they are not sure of what is happening to them.

Read more at Scrubs

Things for which I would never apologise - ever

Not answering phone calls from work or checking work email while I'm on vacation. Leave me voicemail if it's really important and I'll call you back.

This policy stems from the time the house supervisor called me and asked me to come in one morning for an "incentive shift." I replied that sorry, I couldn't come in, and got subjected to a lecture about how not-a-team-player I was and how my coworkers were going to suffer. I said, "Yeah, yeah, but I'm in CANADA" and that was that

Read more at Head Nurse Blog

What is grounded theory?

Grounded theory (GT) is a research method concerned with the generation of theory,1 which is ‘grounded’ in data that has been systematically collected and analysed.2 It is used to uncover such things as social relationships and behaviours of groups, known as social processes.3 It was developed in California, USA by Glaser and Strauss during their study—‘Awareness of Dying’.1 It is a general methodology for developing theory that is grounded in data which is systematically gathered and analysed.

Read more from Evidence based nursing