ADHD and Diet

 

Children with ADHD Need Healthier Diets

A new study suggests that feeding children the wrong kinds of food could lead to behavioral problems.

By Emily Main

What you can do

Broaden your kids’ culinary horizons with a diet rich in vegetables, whole grains, and fish.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Most parents know that feeding kids lots of sugar will undoubtedly lead to the youngsters bouncing off walls, crying and, eventually, crashing out on the couch in a sugar-induced coma. That’s one case where the link between food and behavior is pretty clear. But a new study in the Journal of Attention Disorders suggests that sugar, along with other types of unhealthy processed foods, could have more subtle effects on a child’s mental health. The study found an association between Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and diet, specifically Western diets that include too many processed meats, full-fat dairy, and unhealthy carbohydrates.

 

Cancer Patient’s Experience…

This week, I heard from a neurofeedback client I had worked with a few years ago for anxiety who now has cancer and has been going through an extremely difficult time.  Receiving radiation treatments is never easy, and on top if it, he has been having panic attacks, mostly in the middle of the night. The panic is a repercussion of overload that he is dealing with, a relief valve of sorts. And it is a healthy mechanism for maintaining equilibrium in his system, but certainly not pleasant at all.   So he called to ask if I could help.

 

Neurofeedback helps Veteran with PTSD

Experimental treatment gives hope to sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder

ANNE MCILROY

Last updated Saturday, Oct. 01, 2011 6:19AM EDT

Lead imageAubrey Francis, 42, undergoes a neural feedback therapy session which he has found very helpful in treatment of his PTSD in Kingston, Ontario on Sept 27, 2011. He and his wife, Tracy have recently started a family with the birth of their first child, Perry, three months. (Peter Power/The Globe and Mail)
 

Neurofeedback Improves Student Performance

Published in the online publication: MyWestHartfordLife.com

 

West Hartford psychotherapist uses neurofeedback training to improve student performance
Monday – July 25, 2011

The student who can never sit still during a teacher’s lesson is often viewed as a “problem child.” However, in many cases these kids are in fact facing their own learning barriers, such as restlessness, inability to maintain visual focus and being easily distracted. As a result, the academic requirements make the child feel “bullied” by the environment as they do not sense that they are able to succeed.

 

Evoking a healing response…

Evoking a healing response… Once in awhile a client, either a child or an adult, will not return to neurofeedback training after experiencing what they see (or their parents see) as a side effect of the training.  In truth, given that we never ever push the brain whatsoever, the brain is MOVING THROUGH a block that has been there, usually the reason why they came in for help in the first place.  This is a healing response (remember neuroplasticity) and has been known my humans for thousands of years- though today, much of allopathic medicine tries to suppress symptoms rather than help support the immune system to strengthen itself by going through the response and thus building immunity.

I recall so clearly a client telling me, ”I don”t want to go back to the past”, when in fact this unresolved issue that she had obviously been carrying around for years and which caused her tremendous anxiety (the reason she came to see me in the first place), was ready to be digested and assimilated so that she could live a fuller and happier life- but she saw it differently.

 

What is a non-linear, dynamical system?

From the Summer 2011 Newsletter
NeurOPTIMAL® Neurofeedback
A Non-Linear, Dynamical Approach to Brain Training…OK! So what is a non-linear, dynamical system?Simple nonlinear, dynamical systems can exhibit completely unpredictable behavior (notice someone who is upset, or a hurricane or an avalanche- all non-linear systems), which might seem to be random.  This seemingly unpredictable behavior has been called ‘chaos’.

We now know that the human brain is a non-linear, dynamical system that lives on the edge of chaos and order which allows for it’s tremendously sophisticated processing capabilities on behalf of our personal survival.  In the linear forms of neurofeedback, the practitioner uses a diagnosis to determine how to proceed with the client.  They will push and/or inhibit certain brainwave frequencies in order to get intended changes; a problem is the side effects that can come about from pushing a persons brain.

 

Stopping too soon…

I get a call from Jack’s mother (not his real name) after only 2 sessions saying that they are canceling his sessions.  He experienced a bit of depression which is why they brought him in originally.  I had explained to them before we started that, although very rare, some people will experience an exacerbation in symptoms that are in their repertoire already.  But the difference is that with NeurOPTIMAL, folks will move through these old symptoms rather then cycle through over and over.  NeurOPTIMAL targets turbulance that the brain is producing based on overload.

Children are delicate…

 

Brain Freeze…

Sharon Begley’s article in the March 7, 2011 Newsweek magazine says it all: “How the deluge of information paralyzes our ability to make good decisions”!

This is what I am seeing from clients, many of them children.  People are contacting me because they or their children are overwhelmed in work and at school and in life in general.  This overwhelm, known as unresolved stress, is causing them to behave in ways that do not make for successful outcomes.  When we become overloaded, our systems can at times go a little ‘haywire’, it appears at first sight, though our Central Nervous System is actually behaving as designed in an intelligent way in order to keep us from blowing up or burning out.

 

TALK ABOUT STRESS…

by David Delaney

I get calls from potential clients on a regular basis who are out of work, have anxiety and need help improving their focus, motivation, and ability to be stay calm in the face of challenge, and present when they interview for jobs.  Another way to say this is that they need improved peak or optimal performance.  This is a very difficult economy for many folks and losing a job can have devastating effects on a person’s confidence and financial worries, on top of family, social obligations, and the pressures of an intense life what we all experience.

 

Approaches to the Treatment of PTSD

authors:

Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D., Onno van der Hart, Ph.D., Jennifer Burbridge, M.A.

Originally appeared in S. Hobfoll & M. de Vries (Eds.), Extreme stress and communities: Impact and intervention (NATO Asi Series. Series D, Behavioural and Social Sciences, Vol 80). Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic. Note that this online version may have minor differences from the published version.
Trauma Clinic
227 Babcock Street
Brookline, MA 02146
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School

Introduction

Terrifying experiences that rupture people’s sense of predictability and invulnerability can profoundly alter the ways that they subsequently deal with their emotions and with their environment. The syndrome of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can follow such widely different stressors as war trauma, physical and sexual assaults, accidents, and other natural and man-made disasters. Mirroring the confusion and disbelief of people whose basic assumptions are shattered by traumatic experiences, the psychiatric profession periodically has been fascinated by trauma, followed by sudden disbelief in the importance of trauma in the genesis of psychopathlogy. Over the past decade our profession has experienced the third intense wave of efforts to grasp the reality of trauma on body and soul, after the first at the Salpetriere during the closing decades of the 19th century, and the second, spearheaded by Abram Kardiner (1941), in the 1940s. The findings about the consequences of trauma and what constitutes effective treatment have been extraordinarily consistent over these 120 years.

 
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