Loving Someone with A Mental Illness | Facebook Live

"Let's Talk" Facebook Live Series

In The Family Institute's May livestream, also in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we discussed how to love someone with a mental illness and support them without overstepping boundaries or sacrificing your own mental well-being.

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Anxiety: Benefits and Drawbacks | Webinar

Northwestern Alumni Career Webinars

Thomas Alm, Psy.D., Licensed Clinical Psychologist at The Family Institute, discusses how our brains evolved to be primed for threat but how often our level of response doesn’t match the threat we are facing. He talks about the benefits of anxiety as well as the drawbacks when our anxiety interferes with living a valued life across the lifespan. Dr.

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Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Among Adolescents

Implications for Treatment, Prevention & Research

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) refers to deliberate, socially unacceptable destruction of one's own body tissue performed without the intention to die. Research shows that about 1 in 25 adults has engaged in NSSI, but rates are significantly higher among adolescents: around 1 in 5 engage in NSSI, and among adolescents hospitalized for psychiatric issues, rates are considerably higher (40-80%).
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Ways to help someone struggling with thoughts of suicide

Today's news of Anthony Bourdain's suicide, and earlier this week Kate Spade's death are tragic reminders that mental illness and suicide can affect anyone regardless of income or success. In addition, it speaks to the enormous impact that suicide has on loved ones - as partners, children, friends and family struggle with their loss.

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Thirteen Reasons Why & What Comes Next

You can’t venture on to the Internet these days without stumbling across some sort of editorial about the Netflix show Thirteen Reasons Why. The Chicago Tribune has called the show “highly problematic” and “dangerously wrong” (VanNoord, 2017). Vanity Fair has referred to Thirteen Reasons Why as “unsettling visual genius” (Robinson, 2017).

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Badmouthing Your Spouse to Your Kids May Backfire

Boomerang Effect

High conflict couples may try to keep denigrating comments out of the kids’ earshot, but angry words can travel through walls and doors before the children have fallen off to sleep at night.
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Cinematic Psychotherapy Stereotypes

In perhaps the earliest on-screen fictional portrayal of a mental health professional, a young woman was depicted as being controlled by a hypnotist in the 1896 silent film Trilby. Psychotherapists and other mental health professionals have been portrayed in well over 5,000 films (Flowers & Frizler, 2004), and across many genres including drama, horror, musical, western, and even hardcore pornography (Greenberg, 2000). Indeed, 17% of the most popular films of the 1990s portrayed at least one mental health professional (Young, Boester, Whitt, & Stevens, 2008).
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How to Help Your Kid Overcome Anxiety

Feeling Excited

Our kids regularly face situations that provoke strong emotion: the first day of school, playing in a big game, giving an oral report, attending the prom. At those times, it’s not uncommon for them to feel unsettled and ill at ease. They might say they’re feeling anxious. We’ve been there; we know what they’re talking about.
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Caring for the Caregivers

Ensuring the Well-Being of caregivers

Chronic health conditions, or psychological or physical health conditions that persist for 3 months or longer (Newacheck & Taylor, 1992), are quite common. About half of all adults in the U.S. have at least one chronic health condition, and about 25% have two or more (Ward, Schiller, & Goodman, 2014). While arthritis and muscoskeletal conditions are the leading cause of activity limitations among working-age adults, psychological disorders are the second leading cause among individuals age 18-44 years old (National Center for Health Statistics, 2006). In 2007, approximately 39% of the nearly 41 million disabled individuals had mental disabilities, which include disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar and chronic depression (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007).
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Valued Action

Taking Steps in Meaningful Life Directions

Mental illness has a significant impact on the welfare of our population. It is associated with decreased work productivity (e.g., Kessler, et al., 2008), increased health care cost and utilization (e.g., Ormel, et al., 2008), and decreased quality of life and life satisfaction (e.g., Rapaport, Clary, Fayyad, & Endicott, 2005). In the psychological literature, quality of life has been defined as the extent to which an individual is satisfied with different aspects of daily living. Research consistently demonstrates a strong association between quality of life impairment and mental illness.
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