Ever since I saw the words “Healthy Choice” emblazoned on a box of frozen food at my local supermarket, I have been wondering what indeed makes up a truly healthy choice. According to the packaging that day, a healthy choice was a frozen convenience food possessed of less calories and more nutrition than your typical Swanson fried chicken dinner. The packaging said I would achieve health in terms of trimmer waist line, higher energy level and better general wellness, if indeed I was prepared to shell out the extra few bucks for it.
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Back in the day, I worked at a place called The Coffee Connection. CC was an institution in Harvard Square, a progenitor of fine blended coffees that was eventually swallowed up by Starbucks. CC had great coffee and by great I mean actual Jamaican Blue Mountain at some $28.00 a pound. Also they carried Celebes, Moca Java and other terrific coffees from all over the world. Columbian, which most of us these days consider good, was cheap, along with French Roast, which was relegated to the touristy café au laits. It was a place of rather hip and somewhat jovial snobbery. When I was in college, I took it upon myself to write a critique of Percy Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” as a treatise on the inner-workings of a mind as it contemplated a memory. Shelley’s poem was a recollection of seeing the Vale of Chamonix in Savoy. Now, anyone who has studied poetry will know that writing about how a mind works is not an unusual topic for the Romantics (see Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” for example), but what I did that was different from what I’d seen before in critiques was to connect Shelley’s vision with what I’d learned on another front, i.e., that the right brain tends to be the home of spatial and emotional thought while the left houses language and linear thinking. Picture yourself on a beach, all alone, the sun beating down on your body. The only sound you here is your breath going in and out of your lungs and the sound of the waves crashing against the shore. Your mind is completely free with just a few simple thoughts coming and going. As you take a breath in and release it out, you can feel all of the tension and stress leaving your body and floating to the sea along with the waves. You experience complete relation. This is meditation. According to the Centers of Disease Control, over eight percent of children in the US are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or AD/HD. That’s about 5.3 million of those ages 3-17 years old that have this disorder. In our home state of North Carolina, ten percent of children are diagnosed with ADHD. So what can we do at Carolina Partners in Mental Health to help our community with this epidemic? Some treatments that we can provide are :
Carolina Partners has recently recruited expressive art therapist Allison Grubbs, MSW, LCSW, LCAS to our Wellness Center in Raleigh. Allison will be offering a combination of traditional mental health counseling, mindfulness/meditation and expressive art therapy. Some of our mental health community is not familiar with art therapy, so we’d like to take this opportunity to explain what it is and how it works.
According to the International Art Therapy Organization, art therapy is “a form of expressive therapy that uses art materials, such as paints, chalk and markers. Art therapy combines traditional psychotherapeutic theories and techniques with an understanding of the psychological aspects of the creative process, especially the affective properties of the different art materials.” The National Institute of Health describes art therapy as a “mental health profession that uses the creative process of art-making to improve and enhance the physical, mental and emotional well-being of individuals of all ages”. Art therapy is employed in many clinical settings with diverse populations. It can be found in non-clinical settings as well, such as in art studios and in workshops that focus on creativity development. Art therapists work with children, adolescents, and adults and provide services to individuals, couples, families, groups, and communities. With the addition of the Carolina Partners Wellness Center and naturopathic doctor, Dr. Kivette Parkes, I wanted to let the Carolina Partners community know what she and the center have to offer. I also want to address some of the stereotypes people think of when they hear the term ‘wellness’ and then answer some questions about what naturopathic medicine really is. When it comes to mental health issues, it seems that nothing is more stigmatized then self-harming behavior – specifically, cutting. Cutting, known in mental health circles usually as a form of non-suicidal self-injury, is most prevalent in teenagers and young adults. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that one in ten college students will participate in at least 100 episodes of cutting over the course of their lifetimes. Nationwide, estimates are somewhere near three million – that’s three million people who purposely harm themselves without the intent to end their lives. Why? This past week, somebody I knew from my graduating high school class died of a heroin overdose. As the outpourings of grief and mourning washed over my Facebook page, the bitterness I felt surprised me: I would not remember him fondly, as so many of his “friends” proclaimed they would. I would remember him as the hostile, mean teenager who tormented my friends and me relentlessly during our high school years. The hate I’d always felt for him – the fear, the outrage, both the physical and emotional damage he inflicted – came screaming back, even after all this time. I figured after six years, after countless successes, after all the good I had done and experienced, the love I now knew, I could forgive and forget. Honestly, his name had been lost to me up until that moment. It’s the first time I’ve thought about him in years… Sheriffs in North Carolina, through the Sheriff’s Association, recently pushed the idea that police should |
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Copyright 2009 Carolina Partners in Mental HealthCare, PLLC |
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