FORT LAUDERDALE COUNSELING AND THERAPY BLOG
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - Emotional Support Animals (ESAs)
For travel or for “no pets” housing, you will need an Emotional Support Animal Evaluation. It is critically important to have this done by a professional who knows what they are doing. Not a week goes by where we do not receive a call from someone who has received an ESA Evaluation from an out-of-state or internet provider who did not understand the requirements or process, and therefore the client’s letter was poorly written and invalid, and was subsequently rejected by a housing authority.
We are used to cleaning up others’ messes! Contact us to schedule your evaluation today.
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - The Twelve Questions
The Twelve Questions of Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, says that to build a great story, everyone needs to think deeply about these twelve questions:
How will you use your gifts?
What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
So, the remaining question for you is - what do you want your life to be? Answer that, and today would be good day to start. You can do it!
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - Depression Can Be Treated
“…and whenever I get down, I go have an hour with [my therapist] and the world is beautiful again. If a guy who thought he could walk through walls can say, "I feel like shit here, I'm crying every night, I'm fucking sick of hating myself and I need to see someone," then there's no reason why anyone else can't. It doesn't mean that you're weak. It means you're fucking clever. You can either sulk and die or go do something about it.”
— Former world champion boxer Ricky Hatton
Depression can be treated. Please contact Maesk Counseling for help.
#mentalhealth #maeskcounseling
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - Loneliness
Nov. 19, 2018, 3:42 PM EST
By Dr. Olimpia Paun, geropsychiatric clinical nurse specialist and researcher
At the 1976 Democratic National Convention, Hubert H. Humphrey said, “The ultimate moral test of any government is the way it treats three groups of its citizens."
"First, those in the dawn of life — our children, " he added. "Second, those in shadows of life — our needy, our sick, our handicapped. Third, those in the twilight of life — our elderly."
At the time, he said that Republicans had "failed this basic test of political morality." But as a former psychiatric visiting nurse and now as a researcher working with family caregivers of persons with dementia, it's a test that many of us are failing.
That is because loneliness is a broad societal problem that affects not only Americans, but everyone on the globe, as social isolation becomes widespread with an aging population.
Six million Americans 65 and older live alone in their communities, are homebound because of medical or emotional conditions or lack access to transportation. Many of these adults become physically isolated and emotionally lonely, contributing to what many call the loneliness epidemic.
Recent research indicates that loneliness and social isolation are risk factors for depression, impaired cognitive performance, dementia progression, compromised immune system, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, stroke and an overall increased mortality risk.
Take my elderly neighbor, Mary: we first crossed paths when she was walking her dog, and we smiled at each other, nodded and went about our business.
Soon after that, on a weekend evening, I noticed she had not picked up her newspaper that day, so I knocked on her front door. She was surprised but grateful that someone cared enough to check on her; few other people ever had. We remained friends for a decade, until she passed away.
Her circumstances are far too common. As a psychiatric visiting nurse in the mid-90s, I had the privilege to work with many older adults confined to their homes or apartments because of physical and/or mental health limitations. In many cases, apart from the occasional Meals-on-Wheels volunteers, I was the only other human being they interacted with over the course of each week.
My presence ensured that they maintained a degree of safety, medication adherence and, if necessary, that they would be connected with further medical care before a crisis ensued.
But not every elderly person living along can count on having a nurse used to working with older adults living on her block or coming by the house. And, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data, the population of adults 65 and over will grow from 49.2 million in 2016 to 78 million by 2035. As the number of older adults increases at such a fast pace, so will the needs for addressing their health care needs, including those created by loneliness and isolation.
According to recent reports, a few major health care providers across the U.S. are already defining loneliness and isolation as social determinants of health. These providers are taking measures to connect their clients through basic measures such as home visits, phone contacts and providing transportation. The hope is that preventing and combating loneliness and isolation in older adults may prove cost effective.
Many of the connecting strategies to combat loneliness, though, rely on technology. While online messaging, voice and video chatting and social networking are effective ways to connect, not all older adults in the U.S. and globally can afford or have access to the Internet. In 2017, a Pew Research Center Survey found that only four in 10 seniors in the US owned a smartphone, only about half of them subscribed to high speed internet services and only one-third accessed social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.
Low tech programs are out there, but they're mostly volunteer-based — like The Little Brothers-Friends of the Elderly, a non-profit volunteer agency with eight chapters across the United States. Volunteers visit those who are homebound, organize holiday and birthday celebrations, and even plan mini-vacations.
Many organizations are just beginning to launch self-assessment and awareness campaigns to bring attention to the problem of social isolation in older populations. The AARP Foundation, launchedConnect2Affect in 2016, collaboration with organizations such as the Gerontological Society of America, United Healthcare, Give an Hour and the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging. The goal was to increase understanding of the complexities of loneliness and isolation in older adults, raise awareness of the public health implications, and rally resources to create evidence-based interventions.
Other nations are addressing the loneliness epidemic directly through policy initiatives.
In 2017, The Australian Coalition to End Loneliness enlisted the combined efforts of academic, not-for-profit, national, local and community-based resources to raise awareness, advocate and create evidence-based interventions to eradicate loneliness.
And in the United Kingdom, a recent report by The Jo Cox Commission inspired the Prime Minister Theresa May to pledge the equivalence of $23 million to tackle loneliness that afflicts an estimated 4 million British older adults. Earlier this year, May charged the Minister for Sport and Civil Society to include loneliness under its auspices, naming Tracy Crouch its Minister of Loneliness.
Medicare spends a reported additional $6.7 billion per year to treat the health problems of persons with limited social connections.
In the absence of a national plan endorsing the older adult loneliness epidemic in the U.S., millions simply rely on volunteer-based, charitable organizations to address a serious problem with severe public health implications. Or they will have neighbors, like Mary did, who are able and willing to visit them and check on their well-being.
Relying on individuals to be their neighbor’s keeper may indeed be a moral test for the individual but, as Humphrey opined four decades earlier, it is also a moral imperative of government and policy makers to create policies, standards and frameworks to care for those who have paved the paths before us.
I am willing to check on people I understand may need my help; I see it is not only as a kindness, but as my social responsibility. In the broader picture, how we as a nation address the needs of our elderly is a reflection of our humanity. This is difficult political test as well, and one that must be passed and passed on, not passed over.
Dr. Olimpia Paun
Dr. Olimpia Paun is an associate professor in the College of Nursing at Rush University and a geropsychiatric clinical nurse specialist and researcher. She is a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project.
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - Therapy
Individual, couples or family therapy - we are here for you!
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - Trauma in Our Public and Private Lives
NOTE: This is NOT a political post. I am posting this because it is a very insightful, personal and much needed commentary on trauma, the treatment of which is the new great frontier of psychotherapy. I hope it will get you thinking, and that it will help. Posted with permission of the author, Mr. Matthew Dowd, to whom I am very grateful.
With bitter division, America needs a president who can heal in 2020
By
MATTHEW DOWD
Jul 1, 2019, 4:02 PM ET
In January 2017, I said on ABC News that America had not been this divided since the Civil War, and the last two plus years has confirmed this conclusion numerous times. We are divided in so many different ways today – by sex, party, age, race, religion and region.
While we have not taken up arms against each other as happened in the battle to save the Union, words of hate and contempt proliferate, and we are again in a different kind of fight to save the Union.
The presidential election of 2020 is going to be a poignant and historic moment to see if we can begin to heal these divides and breathe new vigor into this great experiment of democracy and to see if we can rebuild the bonds of our American family. Thus one of the characteristics I am looking for as we all peruse whom to vote for is who can best bring a healing vision to our country.
I have read much about the effects of trauma on individuals, and have experienced some of this trauma myself -- through divorce, the loss of two children, the loss of a younger sister to drug addiction, the jettisoning of a political career when I publicly broke with President George W. Bush, and in watching how our politics has caused rifts in my own family.
One thing I have come to believe is that trauma can occur privately and personally to each of us, and it can occur publicly and in a more broad way to us as a community. Wounds we carry with us affect not only our own daily lives; we are also impacted as a group when leaders bully, divide, push hate and inspire not love, but fear.
From a public sense, these wounds are real. And just as we have a choice to heal our own private wounds and come through it all as more compassionate and empathetic and less judgmental, seeking to enlarge our hearts through love and kindness, so too politically do we have a choice to try and heal wounds writ large. And those are the leaders America needs at this point in our history.
Who are the leaders who will push for love instead of hate? Who are the leaders who seek consensus and the common good -- and not division and what is best for only a small group of Americans? Who understands that we need to retain the values of antiquity like integrity and compassion while understanding that we are in a transformative moment where the current problems can't be solved with old solutions?
Let us look for leaders who have developed a language of union and peace rooted in their own growth from trauma and wounding. Those leaders who have overcome loss, who grew up with little financially or know they were blessed by the accident of birth and want to share, who have overcome racism or sexism or ageism or any form of discrimination along their journeys. And by overcoming these hurdles, they are less concerned with defeating enemies, but more concerned with bringing us together as a country.
Those leaders that can heal publicly are very likely those leaders who have healed privately through hardship or hate. Seek those leaders who didn't become bitter and whose hearts shrunk, but whose hearts have grown larger and become softer.
I know that everyone might see their own indication of this in many different candidates -- and that is a wonderful thing -- but if one is making a list of criteria of the leaders America needs in this moment, let us put at the top of that list those candidates who reach out beyond boundaries and walls, and who see that we all share a common humanity that includes loss.
Yes, we each have experienced our own distinct traumas -- that is the nature of our humanness and a cruel world at times. But we each also have suffered public trauma in the midst of hate and the terrible divisions which have gripped these United States today.
Let us look for leaders whose purpose they see not as punishing opponents, but as pursuing a path of respect, compassion, and justice for all. This is why Mandela and Lincoln were such important leaders, because they spoke to their countries in an attempt to heal, rather than to ride the existing wave of hate battering the land we all love.
Matthew Dowd is an ABC News analyst and special correspondent. Opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of ABC News.
From Maesk Counseling Fort Lauderdale - Emotional Support Animals (ESA)
Maesk Group Counseling provides Emotional Support Animal (ESA) evaluations. It is well documented through research that pets provide benefit to people suffering from anxiety, depression, PTSD, insomnia and many other conditions. Having an ESA prescription letter allows you to have your pet in no-pets housing, and allows you to travel with your pet in the cabin of airlines at no additional cost.
There are other details/benefits. Feel free to contact the office to schedule your consultation.
***THE LAWS IN FLORIDA WILL BE CHANGING SOON! IT IS IMPORTANT TO GET YOUR ESA EVALUATION NOW!***
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - Therapy Timetable?
Lots of people ask: How long will I be in therapy? The short answer is, well, it depends.
There are many factors that determine length of treatment, including the severity of presenting problems, how well someone responds to treatment and various other factors. As a general guideline however, I would say that the average person is in therapy for 3 - 6 months. That’s usually enough time to resolve most immediate concerns and getting you to “feel like you” again. At the beginning of our work together, I will provide you with my best professional estimate of how long to expect to be in treatment. And of course, the treatment plan will be developed in collaboration with you.
Therapy works. There is plenty of clinical evidence to back that up. If you are feeling that therapy might help, then you should probably make that call or send that email to get help. As the Dalai Lama said, “The purpose of life is Happiness.” I agree!
From Maesk Counseling in Fort Lauderdale - Emotional Support Animals
Maesk Group Counseling provides Emotional Support Animal (ESA) evaluations. It is well documented through research that pets provide benefit to people suffering from anxiety, depression, PTSD, insomnia and many other conditions. Having an ESA prescription letter allows you to have your pet in no-pets housing, and allows you to travel with your pet in the cabin on airlines at no additional cost.
There are other details/benefits. Feel free to contact the office to schedule your consultation.