Blog

  • Moms Soothing

    Guess you don’t know for absolutely sure until you study it: Mother’s Voice Calms Stress. Once stressed, one third of the girls were comforted in person by their mothers – specifically with hugs, an arm around the shoulders and the like. One third were left to watch an emotionally neutral 75-minute video. The rest were…

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  • Journaling and Chronic Pain

    A new page on the TMS Wiki details various approaches to journaling. They’re up there to help people with chronic pain, but journaling can be a big help to just about anyone.  Among the approaches on the page: List Making, Spider Writing, Free Writing, Unsent Letters, and Dialogue. Several workbooks, which’ll help you through the…

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  • Stopping Pain Without Drugs

    Here’s a quick interview with Dr. Vijay Vad, author of “Stop Pain.”  He suggests exercise for chronic pain.  Not quite on the stress illness bandwagon, but in its neighborhood: I have seen a big explosion in chronic back pain and arthritis, and what I realized is that people have very limited self-help options. In the…

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  • Reducing “Self-Stigma”

    A study uses something called Narrative Enhancement Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to address internalized stigma for people with mental illness. The intervention is aimed at giving people with a mental illness the necessary tools to cope with the “invisible” barrier to social inclusion – self-stigma.  [The study] showed that those who participated in the intervention exhibited…

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  • CBT and Depression

    A study suggests more C, less B is helpful in early weeks of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy treatment for depression.  Also: Patients improved more when they collaborated with their therapists about a plan for treatment and followed that plan.  Not surprisingly, patients also showed greater improvement when they were more engaged in the therapy process and…

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