What if someone changed your name?

Can you even imagine how you’d react if someone changed your name?

This could happen to over one million American adults (and even more children) with Asperger’s Syndrome.

The American Psychiatric Association is considering eliminating this diagnosis in its next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to be published in 2013.

A primary reason is that researchers haven’t been able to distinguish differences between individuals with high functioning autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.  So the new diagnosis will simply be Autism Spectrum Disorder and individuals might be classified as low or high functioning on this continuum.

The problem this creates for the already diagnosed population of Asperger’s Syndrome individuals is that their diagnosis has given them an identity.  They call themselves “Aspies”.  They have community support groups and many more on web communities. Books and website are designed with their name. They fear they will be lost and lumped together with many other people.  Along with their identity, they’re concerned that support, treatment, and educational accommodations might vanish with the elimination of the diagnosis.

Some organizations supporting Asperger’s Syndrome have already begun to battle this proposal with petitions. We’ll have to await the verdict in 2013.

A few months ago, I wrote how the media generates headlines designed to grab our attention but which increasingly oversimplify and distort the truth.

They’ve done it again.  A USA Today headline January 9, 2012 claims “Study: Healthy Eating May Help Children with ADHD.”  The first sentence states, “There’s limited evvidence that any particular diet or supplement helps kids with ADHD.” Later in the article, a pediatrician is quoted saying, “We don’t have data to suggest that there is little, if any, data to suggest dietary interventions are as effective as medications.”  The overall conclusion is that a healthy diet of rish, vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and fiber is better than a diet high in fat, salt, and refined sugars.  Duh.  What else is new?

Two days later, USA Today has another story, “ADHD: Diet Might Matter, but Less Than Many Parents  Think.”  This article summarizes the very same research showing minimal support for improvement in ADHD symptoms resulting from food diets or supplements.  Notice how this headline minimizes the effects of food on ADHD symptoms.

These two headlines illustrate the power of headlines.  The moral again:  Don’t believe simplistic headlines or sound bytes. Be an intelligent consumer and read the whole story.

The following humorous but true “rules of reality” poster for teens  has been an all-time favorite on my office bulletin board.  It was written over 15 years ago by Charles Sykes in Dumbing Down Our Kids.

1. Life is not fair; get used to it.

2. The world won’t care about your self-esteem.  The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

3. If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss.

4. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.  Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

5. If you screw up, it’s not your parents’ fault so don’t whine about your mistakes.  Learn from them.

6. Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now.  They got that way paying your bills, clearning your room, and listening to how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the bloodsucking parasites of your parents’ generaltion, try delousing the closed in your own room.

7. Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not.  In some schools, they’ve abolished failing grades.  They’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer.  This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

8. Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself.  Do that on your own time.

9. Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

10. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Today, Thanksgiving, may be an opportunity to enhance your psychological well-being.

Studies have found that expressing gratitude is linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression and kinder behavior towards others.

Another benefit of expressing gratitude is that it’s linked to reduced hostility.  A study at the University of Kentucky showed that individuals who were insulted expressed less hostility if they had previously written an essay about things for which they were grateful.  The researchers speculated that expressing gratitude increases empathy for others and thus, decreases hostility.

No one wants to experience anger, especially over the holidays. You can begin a weekly gratitude journal now by listing 5 things you’re thankful for.

There’s a fascinating new field of research called behavioral economics that studies how cognitive and psychological factors affect economic decisions.

Here’s an example of how this works on a daily basis.  In a restaurant, you’ll tend to order a $25 steak if there’s a $50 steak on the menu.  A $25 steak alone on the menu would seem too expensive.  This is called the anchoring effect.  The $50 steak anchors your expectations of what a steak should cost.  So you figure you’re getting a deal at $25.  Restaurant “menu engineers”  figured this out a long time ago.  Another secret of menu engineers:   listing less expensive items at the bottom or back of the menu.

The Sept. 8, 2011 online Medscape headline, “Omega-3 Effective for Treating Child ADHD” caught my eye.  I was curious because many previous studies had hoped, but failed to find a consistent improvement in ADHD symptoms from Omega-3 or fish oil.

After reading the article, I learned that this “new” finding was inaccurate.  The truth is the headline attempted to summarize a study that reviewed 10 prior studies using Omega-3 for ADHD children.  The conclusion was that only 2 of these studies showed improvement in symptoms compared to placebo groups.  The study’s author stated that “it was only when you combined the studies that the effect became significant to a small degree”.  Don’t bother trying to understand this statistical language.  Bottom line is that, in fact, the vast majority of children in these studies did not benefit from omega-3.

Later that same week, a TIME published an article, “A Yale Psychologist Calls for the End of Individual Psychotherapy“.  No, not exactly.  In fact, the Yale psychologist, Alan Kazdin, Ph.D. went on record to dispute the writer’s interpretation of his her interview with him.  He stated, “Lamentably, the headline and aspects of the story gave the impression that individual psychotherapy and those who provide such services are of little value.  This is exacerbated by a tone that can be seen as provocative and dismissive.  Thus, both content and style are opposite from my intent, my professional
and personal views, my demeanor, and the interview.” ( personal email communication 9/20/11)

We’ve always known not to judge a book by its cover.  In the new age of “journalism”, we should not come to conclusions based on headlines or soundbytes.

Robert Emmons, Ph.D, a psychology professor at UC Davis has been studying the positive effects of gratitude for over 10 years.  He defines gratitude as “the feeling that occurs when a person attributes a benefit they’ve received to another person”.  Multiple studies have verified the positive impact of practicing gratitude on life happiness, stress level, physical wellbeing, and depression.

A recent study from Kent State University showed just how easy it is to practice gratitude.  Two groups wrote a 15 minute letter once a week for 3 weeks.  One group wrote a letter of gratitude to someone for something important that person had done.  The 3 letters were written to different people.  The other group wrote letters on some other topic.  After three weeks, the “gratitude” group felt happier, more satisfied, and among individuals with some depression, less depressed.

Learn more about gratitude and take a quiz to see how grateful you are.

A striking serenity was apparent in the snow covered mountain peaks and glaciers of the Canadian Rockies where my wife and I recently vacationed. Even the elk, deer, and mountain goats were silent as they grazed in open fields. There were no cellphone rings or conversations. There was no traffic or horn honking.

There are certainly advantages to living in cities where 70% of our population is predicted to live by 2050. City dwellers are “wealthier and receive improved sanitation, nutrition, contraception and healthcare.” On the other hand, they have much higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders. One of the main contributors may be noise. Parts of the brain, the amygdala and cingular cortex are overactive in people born in cities.  The same study found that children living near airports had higher levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol.

Seems like the Rocky Mountain homesteaders we met have already figured this out.

 It’s about bad timing.  At an age when a teen’s brain can understand why a certain behavior may be wrong, his/her brain’s self-control mechanism has not fully developed.  This disconnect is the likely reason why teens engage in behavior they know intellectually is risky. 

Brain scans have shown that one part of a teen’s brain is very sensitive to dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter.  That means the teens feel anticipated rewards very powerfully.  Unfortunately, another part of the brain responsible for evaluating and controlling impulses doesn’t fully develop until age 25.  So the felt value of a pleasurable activity overpowers an adolescent’s ability to calculate the risk of that activity.    This may explain why educational efforts, lecturing and preaching to teens aren’t very effective.  The challenge remains……..

 Years ago, I wrote a paper about how IQ tests alone were poor measures of academic or life success.

It’s another season for my office phone to be ringing with requests to test five year olds’ IQs.   Jenny or Ethan might be eligible for a gifted kindergarten program.  Yet another example of our education system’s perpetuating a practice that’s totally unsupported by research.

Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman in NutureShock cite research showing that “IQ is an astonishingly ineffective predictor of a young child’s academic success”.  The operative word is “young”.  Less than 1 out of 3 kindergarten students will qualify for the gifted program if retested in third grade.  This is because young children’s brains are just beginning to develop.  Between the ages 3-10, 2/3 of kids’ IQ scores will improve or drop more than 15 points. 

You might think that school districts would retest kids to insure that they still belong in this program.  Nope.  Not one of the largest 20 school districts requires retesting.  A strong parent lobby killed a bill in a 2007 Florida legislative committee that would have required retesting.

You can’t blame parents for wanting everything they think is best for their kids  Unless our educational system changes its practices and waits until children’s brains are more developed at 7 or 8 years old, parents will continue to attempt to guarantee security in kindergarten and never look back.