Parenting classes should be mandatory, whether you are adopting or not, and would include an evaluation of your current physical, mental and financial state as well as how ready you are to take on the rigors of parenthood. Our children are our most precious natural resource, and there is absolutely no other way to parent but to put them first.
Beauty is an asset, just like physical prowess, charisma, brains or emotional intelligence. The key with any gift is in the way that you use it. It doesn't define you as a person. Rather, it's an asset to be used judiciously and with an understanding of how it is just a small part of who you are.
Post traumatic stress disorder starts out with nightmares, flashbacks and actually reliving the event. And this happens over and over and over and over in your mind. If you let it go on, it can become chronic and become hard if not impossible to treat.
You can run, run, run away from a lot of things in life, but you can't run away from yourself. And the key to happiness is to understand and accept who you are.
I did live through Katrina and also Hurricane Rita, which hit Lake Charles. Interestingly, when Katrina hit, they evacuated and Lake Charles was one of the evacuation destinations. We opened up the civic center of the city to the evacuees and provided them free medical and psychiatric care there.
'Pathological liar' is absolutely the toughest individual to deal with as a psychiatrist. Because you can't take anything they say at face value. And you can't, you know, fill in their personality. You don't know what's real and what's not.
You have to understand that PTSD has to be an event that you experience, a very traumatic event. And actually, there is evidence that brain chemistry changes during this event in certain individuals where it's imprinted indelibly forever and there's an emotion associated with this which triggers the condition.
To my knowledge, there have been no studies done on the effects of antidepressants and altitude. But it is hugely important to find out if there are side effects. We should also find out what are the effects on fine motor skills and reaction time. These are all important questions that should be assessed.
Anything that you can become obsessed with, and you do so much that you don't do the things you need to do with family, friends, school, job - that can be an addiction. And texting absolutely can qualify.
Kids take work, effort, love, blood, sweat and tears and are a full time job. You have to commit, for better or worse and then give your all and hope for the best. The one thing you can never, ever do is give up and say, 'Oooops, never mind, my bad, you can take this one back!'
Upper education used to open doors. Not so true anymore. The degree used to be a screening tool, but that is falling by the wayside as there are a glut of college grads on the market.
Universities used to prepare young adults for the real world. I dare say the graduates today go in without a clue and graduate without a clue. It's time to acknowledge the college degree is not worth what it was in the past. Times are changing, and so is the way we prepare our youth to survive in a competitive world.
One of the things you learn in rehab is that you're responsible for your own actions.
You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over.
Typically, when you have a depressed individual, they feel hopeless. They feel miserable. Their mind is racing, their heart is pounding. They feel anxious. They feel exhausted yet they can't sleep.
We put more emphasis on who can drive a car than on who can be a parent. And I think there ought to be mandatory parenting classes starting in high school, and you should have to have a license to be able to be a parent to explain that you don't give alcohol to kids.
I think the key for a child to do well in a divorce is, very simply, you have to be honest with them.
The thing about post-traumatic stress disorder, we know about one in five, about 20 percent of individuals that are exposed to a direct traumatic stress will develop this disorder.
