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Pushing drugs in school

April 3, 2013 by

Diagnosed as hyperactive in first grade, Ted Gup’s son was prescribed Ritalin and Adderall, Gup writes in the New York Times.

In another age, David might have been called “rambunctious.” His battery was a little too large for his body. And so he would leap over the couch, spring to reach the ceiling and show an exuberance for life that came in brilliant microbursts.

When he was older, he sold his Adderall to classmates, who saw it as a performance-enhancing drug.

As a 21-year-old college senior, he was found on the floor of his room, dead from a fatal mix of alcohol and drugs.

“I had unknowingly colluded with a system that devalues talking therapy and rushes to medicate, inadvertently sending a message that self-medication, too, is perfectly acceptable,” writes the grieving father.

Now psychiatrists have defined grief as depression, which “runs the very real risk of delegitimizing that which is most human — the bonds of our love and attachment to one another.”  Gup does not plan to take a pill to dull his grief for his son.

Filed Under: Children, Education, Health Tagged With: , , , ,

Study: Computer game helps depressed teens

April 23, 2012 by

Depressed teenagers who played a computer game improved as much as those who met with a counselor, concludes a University of Auckland study in the British Medical Journal. Teens played an interactive 3-D fantasy game called SPARX. Their “avatar has to learn to deal with anger and hurt feelings and swap negative thoughts for helpful ones.”

. . . 44 percent of the SPARX group who carried out at least four of the seven challenges recovered completely. In the conventional treatment group, only 26 percent recovered fully.

“Use of the programme resulted in a clinically significant reduction in depression, anxiety and hopelessness, and an improvement in quality of life,” according to the study led by Sally Merry, an associate professor at the Department of Psychological Medicine.

The adolescents also said they liked being able to play SPARX at home at their own pace.

Filed Under: Children, Health, technology Tagged With: , , ,

Reading, ‘riting and wellness

November 9, 2011 by

Fifteen San Francisco high schools offer a wellness center where students can discuss depression, anger, anxiety, addiction or just stress.

In a recent districtwide survey of teachers who had referred students to Wellness Centers, three-quarters reported greater academic success. Eighty-six percent said they noticed that the students had improved emotional well-being.

“Our No. 1 need is more mental health clinicians,” said Jessica Stein Colvin, who runs the wellness center at Galilieo High. “There is mental health therapy happening here all the time. Every single clinical space is used every hour of the day.”

Rahsaan, a 17-year-old a senior at Galileo, broke up with his girlfriend last year. He is estranged from his parents and siblings — he has lived in the Bayview district with his disabled grandfather, whom he has cared for for more than 10 years.

Last semester, he said, his grades plummeted when he hit an emotional wall.

“I was outside and one of the teachers saw me crying and they brought me down here,” Rahsaan said. “Jessica and the other teacher stayed here after school to make sure I wasn’t going to harm myself or anything. It helped me a lot because I was, like, literally going to kick somebody’s ass and not care about the consequences.”

The wellness centers were started after the Columbine massacre, when many schools were trying to reach troubled teenagers. “We took an approach that was particular to random acts of violence and decided to go broad and provide a spectrum of services so we could reach as many students as possible,” said Kevin Gogin, director of School Health Programs.

Filed Under: Education, Health Tagged With: , , , ,

Doctors warn of ‘Facebook depression’

March 29, 2011 by

Depression-prone teens can feel even worse when they see that classmates have lots of “friends,” activities and “photos of happy-looking people having great times,” pediatricians warn.

“It’s like a big popularity contest — who can get the most friend requests or get the most pictures tagged,” said Abby Abolt, 16, a Chicago high school sophomore and frequent Facebook user.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , , ,

Closed little worlds

February 3, 2011 by

American students are depressed, lazy and not learning very much, writes John Tierney on James Fallows’ Atlantic blog.  Tierney cites a raft of recent studies as well as years of experience as a college professor and now as a high school teacher.

I teach at an “elite” (effete?) independent school for girls in the Boston area. . . . Some of the students I teach work really hard.

. . . But, my sense is that most of the students at this school spend enormous amounts of time watching television, checking out Facebook, and otherwise engaging in totally unproductive activity. They certainly don’t read anything! In fact, I would say that the number one problem in contemporary American education is that students do not read enough. Their reading comprehension is horrible. Their vocabularies are impoverished. They cannot talk about anything outside their own closed little worlds.

In a follow-up, Tierney quotes an e-mail from a “beloved and prominent professor at a small liberal-arts college in New England,” who writes:

You know, I have a special place in my heart for our [Asian] students, who exhibit few of the troublesome traits you lament. The American students are nice kids, and I like them, but I don’t respect them. I guess that’s the thing.

There are intellectually curious, well-read and hard-working students out there, Tierney concedes. But he doesn’t think they’re the norm.

Filed Under: College, Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Away from home, Asian students slide

January 21, 2011 by

Asian-American students’ grades slide in their first year of college — unless they live at home — concludes a study at University of California at Irvine, where Asian-American students outnumber whites. White students’ grades dropped slightly, compared to their 12th-grade GPA, while Asians’ grades fell dramatically in both natural and social sciences, according to University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva. From Miller McCune:

. . .  when Esther Chang studied 120 white and 395 Asian-American undergraduates at a large public university in California, she found that while the white students’ GPAs averaged 3.21, all the Asian-American groups’ GPAs were significantly lower — 3.04 for East Asian, 2.99 for Southeast Asians and 2.94 for Filipinos.

The Asian-American students studied less, went to the library and to class less than the white students, says Chang. She and Dmitrieva speculate that Asian-American parents’ involvement in their children’s out-of-school activities leaves the kids unprepared to manage their time in college. Dmitrieva’s study supports that hypothesis, since the grades of that Asian-American freshman who still lived at home, or scored well on a test measuring academic perseverance and diligence, didn’t drop any more than those of the white students.

Dorothy Chin, associate research psychologist at UCLA’S Semel Institute, believes further research will show Asian-American students “find a way to self-regulate and bounce back” by senior year. Graduation rates are strong for Asian-American students.

Also on Miller McCune:

What looks like pushy, high-pressure parenting to Westerners is seen as loving by Asian-American children, says Ruth Chao, a University of California, Riverside, psychologist.

Studies have found that parental behavior that feels controlling to North American and German children feels warm and accepting to Japanese and Korean children.

. . . Western cultures value individuality and independence highly, so Western teenagers feel rejected when their parents exert a great deal of control, explains Gisela Tromssdorff of the Technical University in Aachen, Germany. On the other hand, she writes, “Japanese adolescents … feel rejected by their parents when they experience only little control.”

Asian-American children don’t report more stress, anxiety or depression than white children — until they reach college. Asian-American college students have the highest suicide rate of any ethnicity.

I wonder if that’s also true for Asian-American college students who live at home.

Filed Under: College, Health, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

‘Tiger’ kids in community college

January 13, 2011 by

Chinese “tiger mothers,” who demand excellence from their children, are superior to Western moms, claims Amy Chua, a Yale law professor with two high-performing daughters.  More tiger children end up at community colleges than the Ivy League, writes a Pasadena Community College professor. And these kids are depressed by their failure to meet their parents’ unreasonable expectations. Some are suicidal.

Also on Community College Spotlight:  Laid-off workers in Iowa are turning to community colleges for retraining, but wait lists are long for programs in health care, welding and other high-demand fields.

Filed Under: College, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Great expectations

April 1, 2010 by

Core Knowledge Blog has an interesting post on The Low Risk of High Expectations.

Aiming high and falling short doesn’t lead to long-term psychological problems, concludes John R. Reynolds, a Florida State sociology professor, in  Is There a Downside to Shooting for the Stars? in the American Sociological Review.

“My previous research showed that teenagers are increasingly unrealistic about what they will be able to achieve,” Reynolds said. “I wanted to see if there is anything wrong with that trend. Lots of theories predict that unmet goals will lead to frustration and anxiety. We were very surprised to find out that over-ambition is not a big concern, at least not from a mental health perspective.”

The study found no long-term emotional costs of aiming high and falling short when it comes to educational aspirations. “We should not be in a hurry to dissuade these students from planning to go to college,” Reynolds said. “In fact, the only way to guarantee negative mental health outcomes is not trying. Aiming high and failing is not consequential for mental health, while trying may lead to higher achievements and the mental and material benefits that go along with those achievements.”

Of course, it would be nice if students were told what they need to do in their K-12 years to realize their ambitions. I’ve met too many D students who say they want to be pediatricians.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Youth more depressed than in Depression

January 12, 2010 by

High school and college students exhibit more anxiety and mental health problems than young people in the Great Depression, reports a study analyzing survey responses from 1938 to 2007.

Jean Twenge, a San Diego State professor who authored the study, speculates that “a popular culture increasingly focused on the external – from wealth to looks and status – has contributed” to the rise in mental health issues.

In the depths of the Depression, only 1 percent of young people surveyed were considered clinically depressed; by 2007 that was up to six percent.

Twenge said the most current numbers may even be low given all the students taking antidepressants and other psychotropic medications, which help alleviate symptoms the survey asks about.

Are young people  more stressed — or more likely to complain about their problems?

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , ,

Harry Potter's resilience

August 12, 2009 by

Given his horrible pre-Hogwarts childhood, Harry Potter should have been clinically depressed, writes Early Ed Watch.

His parents died suddenly when he was a baby, so he was left to grow up in a house with his aunt, uncle and roly-poly bully of a cousin, Dudley. His aunt and uncle barely paid him any mind, but when they did, their growling responses were always negative. He was, in essence, verbally abused and ignored, not to mention half starved. It was a tough way to grow up. And yet he turned out to not only be a hero, but also a thoughtful, kind and productive person. You wouldn’t call Harry happy-go-lucky, but you wouldn’t describe him as depressed either.

The point is that we should be more sensitive to depression in young children, not that J.K. Rowling should have written Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Psychologist.

Filed Under: Children, Health Tagged With: ,
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