Panic / Panic Attacks / Anxiety Attacks
Stress Management / Relaxation
Assertiveness / Self-Esteem / Expressing Yourself
The Assertiveness Guide for Women: How to Communicate Your Needs, Set Healthy Boundaries, and Transform Your Relationships by Julie De Azevedo Hanks divides assertiveness into five areas: self-reflection, self-awareness, self-soothing, self-expression and self-expansion.
The Brain / How to Manage Emotions
Positive Psychology
Positive Emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Achievement
Here’s the same link as above, to his book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
Success / Stick-To-It-Iveness / Persistence
Drugs
Suicide
“But first I’m going to kill myself. Then they’ll be sorry.” That’s immature thinking and manipulative suicide. If that girl had put the energy into her life that she put into her death, she would be Amazing!
In a response to the outcry, backlash, and need for teen help, the website has a page, 13 Reasons Why resources for help.
If you’re feeling severely, imminently, suicidal or homicidal, in the US, you should go to a hospital ER and be placed on a 72 hour hold.
If you need someone to talk with, call a crisis line, 1-800-273-8255 or text 741741 or go to a Crisis Center.
I volunteered on the San Francisco Crisis Line for two years. I know from experience that it helps to talk to someone who cares.
Aging / Illness / Difficult Conversations About End of Life Decisions
Dr Atul Gawande’s webpage about his book, Being Mortal, about elders in America, end of life and medical decision making is a personal narrative about the last few years of his father’s life, an informative book about options for the aging, a professional perspective about the difficulties involved in making medical decisions about terminal conditions, and descriptions of difficult conversations.
I especially liked his passage about Susan Block’s approach. She is a palliative care nurse. She explains that these conversations are a process and doctors generally make a conceptual mistake of thinking that the purpose of the conversation is provide information.
‘A large part of the task is helping people negotiate the overwhelming anxiety–anxiety about death, anxiety about suffering…’ ‘There are many worries and real terrors.’ He notes, “No one conversation can address them all. Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany.”
He shares the rules of having these conversations. Some of them are: “You’re trying to learn what’s most important to them under the circumstances–so that you can provide information and advice on the approach that gives them their best chance of achieving it. This process requires listening… If you’re talking more than half of the time, Block says, you’re talking too much.”
“The words you use matter.” “You should say, ‘I wish things were different.'” And most important, in my opinion, was the question, “‘If time becomes short, what is most important to you?'”
When you’re making New Year’s resolutions, sometimes taking an end-of-life perspective will rearrange your priorities.
I also really liked The Checklist Manifesto, a book that describes the process of getting hospitals to implement surgery checklists and amazing positive outcomes. Back when I was a social case worker, working with Latino youth on probation and their monolingual Spanish speaking parents, I really hoped that Child Protection would implement a checklist to prevent child abuse deaths during and after investigation. I suggested that our department read this book.