Substance Abuse not only affects celebrities, it affects our children and teenagers directly and indirectly, is also inceasing in other age groups and is a tremendous cost to society as a whole.  I have watched  it increase quite rapidly in recent years, with entirely too much of it happening in our children and teenagers. Many things have been done to have stricter control of drugs of abuse,  break up some of the supply sources of these drugs, and make people aware of te problems, yet the problems seem to grow worse.  The best thing we have ever done in any area of medical care - and that should include substance abuse - is related to prevention, and often that prevention strategy is based mostly on education.   For this issue we need to educate as many people as possible about the very serious and costly problems that drug abuse creates for ALL of us, and especially educate our vulnerable young people about  how to avoid it, and the harm it can do to them physically, mentally and to their lives as adults.   More people, especially parents, need to  learn  how to recognize the signs and symptoms of substance abuse, know some of the things that drive that substance abuse, put preventive strategies in place as early as possible, and rather than denying that your child, spouse or other family member might do that, be willing to step up and do an intervention.   Even if they get really angry with you, it is much easier for all of you to get past anger, than to get past that person winding up dead!  That just generates even more pain for family, friends and other members of their social network and too often leads to copycat behaviors, includng death, in people who are already vulnerable because they are in emotional pain.  This program is aimed at giving you skills to prevent, recognize and intervene in problems involving substance abuse for your loved ones, or even yourself.

A great deal has been learned in the last 30 years or so about the impact of various traumas and types of injuries to the brain.  Depending on the type and location, a head trauma can change how you think, how you feel, how you act, how your body works and other issues.   While this is finally getting some much needed publicity, it is currently all focused on athletic injuries, particularly football related concussions. While the attention is a good thing, it is really important for you to kow that these kinds of injuries can happen in many other ways - not just sports injuries - and happen to many unsuspecting people.   It can be the rambunctious child who has an accident, the elderly person having a fall, a whiplash in a car wreck and myriads of other types of people having various kinds of injuries which may not seem important at first, but can wreak havoc with your life later on.   Many doctors still do not have the training and awareness that is needed to recognize this because some of it is still pretty new and specialized.  In this program you will learn some of the types of injuries that can happen, how they can affect your life, some of the things that can be done about them, how to keep an important history about changes that are happening and where to reach for help.

Our emotions are every bit as important a part of sensing what is going on in our world as our eyes, and ears and sense of touch, and yet we treat them as something to be ashamed of - something that means we are somehow defective if all that isn't working perfectly.  When we 'stuff' our emotions or hide them or lie about them, we are dishonoring the very core of our humanness and our ability to connect to self and to others.   When we don't express our emotions it impairs our ability to really connect with our fellow humans, and even with ourselves.   When we don't attend to them we can be missing out on other  important issues as well.   Medications and illnesses can affect our emotions in both good and bad ways, and sometimes that emotional change is the first sign that something is wrong.  For example, a bladder infection could just cause some lower abdominal pain or pain when urinating BUT it could also cause you to be confused - sometimes to the point of looking totally demented - and sometimes the mental change is the first and/or only finding.   What a shame if you got treated for Alzheimers, when the problem was a treatable infection!  Some medications, especially street drugs, can cause what looks like major mental illnesses - cured by stopping that  medication for a long enough time.

   The reverse of this is also true - you may start developing some sort of medical issue - and it could be affecting any area of your body - and it could be nature's way of letting you know you  have a high level of emotional pain you aren't taking care of .  The failure to get in touch with those emotional issues can push you  into more and more serous medical problems.   The two are so intertwined that it is critical to stay in touch with and address both to have a physically and emotionally happy, productive llife.

There are many things written about various 'fears' that humans have which get int he way of enjoying life and/or moving forward - fear of success, fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of going broke, fear of change and so on.   What doesn't really get described is the 'fear of almost anything different' that is an issue for many people - which also often ties to a fear of being 'wrong'.

While differences can sometimes legitimately indicate that a person, creature or situation might be dangerous, most of the time, they simply are more a reflection of diversity than of anything dangerous or threatening.  If things were the constant threats to our survival that get portrayed in horror movies, negative news and passed down tales of the evil in the world, we would probably have all died out eons ago.  Yet despite the 'evils' that are out there, the population keeps growing and the diversity in our lives keeps increasing, and overall life gets pogressively better in many ways. Learning to treat differences as an opportunity to learn and grow rather than  a threat to run and hide from gives great opportunity to enrich one's life immensely.   We will have a little fun here looking at some of the ways we handle things and how we might do it differently and increase our joy in life.

If Men were from Mars and Women were fomr Venus as John Gray discusses in his famous book, they would probably in many ways have much less problem communicating than peole who grow up inthe same country speaking the same language - especially English!  Even 2 humans speaking different languages can learn, through some persistence and determination, to develop some clear understandings of the other persons meaning because they don't start with the assumption they both mean the same thing.  At least there would be the immediate recognition that there were difference in things like language, background and beliefs that could cause similar sounds to have very different meanings.  Then the important task would be to put your brains and curiosity to work exploring, questioning and trying to bridge the gap of those differences.  When you grow up int he same culture there is a very natural tendency to assume that you are both on the same page from the beginning and never check things out.   Today we are going to start learning how each of us can reach out from our individual 'planets' and start communicating much more effectively with those other 'planets' in our personal 'solar system'.

Dr Judy Cook, a psychiatrist with many years of experience, passes on to you some of the tools she has taught to thousands of her patients to help them in their journey to a happier and healthier life.   Despite all the pills and other treatments available to improve peoples mental mindsets, there are more and more serious adverse events happening related to peoples emotional sense of well-being.  More needs to be done to help people recognize when they are having issues and prevent them from getting worse so hopefully they won't need to see a Mental Health Professional, especially since we are in short supply and insurance often doesn't want to pay for us.   She talks of several skills for taking better control of your mindset and the quality of your own life.