In my 30-year career as a social worker and therapist, I have seen many children, adults, couples and families face what seems impossible. There are some common characteristics with those who face impossible with fear and those who face it with hope.
For all of us, the idea of adjusting is so important in understanding ourselves, those around us and the kindness that can happen when offered with care and understanding.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a mental health treatment technique. This method involves moving your eyes a specific way while you process traumatic memories. EMDR's goal is to help you heal from trauma or other distressing life experiences.
On the days that having CP is challenging, it is extra important to take care of yourself, all those feelings and your body. When we can mention how we feel, then we figure out or manage what we need to feel better.
In this new series within Cerebral Palsy Health, Jen sits down with Nathalie Maitre, MD, PhD to talk about parenting, our shared experiences raising sons with CP and more!
This presentation from the 2023 AACPDM Community Forum presents and overview of the interactions between the types of Cerebral Palsy, Mental and Behavioral Health and various medications and strategies to treat challenging mental health disturbances.
Speech impairments like dysarthria are common in children with cerebral palsy (CP) which can greatly affect participation across environments. Our study examined how speech impairment severity changes over time in 101 children with CP at 4, 6, 8, and 10 years of age.
When a person is looking for a way to communicate in alternative ways, they need to find something that really works for them. They need to try to find a voice that sounds natural. They want to try to find a way to be efficient. They want to be able to communicate as normally as possible, even though they're not using their biological voice.
Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that affects how clear and understandable a person’s speech is. Between 50-90% of people with CP have dysarthria.
CPF Executive Director Rachel Byrne and psychologist Gili Segall, PhD discuss mental health during these constantly changing times and how to create strategies to help everyone in the family thrive.
CPF Executive Director Rachel Byrne and Weinberg Cerebral Palsy Center social worker, Jan Moskowitz, discuss strategies for coping with anxiety and depression, especially during times of isolation.
A lot of people with cerebral palsy will experience pain over the course of their life. Through better assessment we can provide better interventions, which will lead to a better quality of life.
The Cerebral Palsy Foundation has created a factsheet to help guide you in understanding and treating pain with CP. This fact sheet has been created for individuals with cerebral palsy to provide basic guidance surrounding common causes and potential treatment of pain.
Adults with Cerebral Palsy have unique care needs related to physiological changes that occurred with growth and development with Cerebral Palsy, including mental health, yet experience many barriers to proper care.
Shelby Nurse discusses how pain has been part of the reality throughout her life. In this video Shelby talks about what strategies and pain management techniques have worked for her and how this have changed and different times.
I suppose there has to be one silver lining that comes out of being sheltered in place for months on end (due to Covid-19): I’ve finally been catching up on sleep. The recommended nightly hours of sleep is between 7 and 9 hours . For me, getting a good night’s sleep has been the best way to regain a sense of control and ease during such unnerving times. Not only does sleep improve mood and
There are so many different causes for potential pain that it can be hard to find the cause. If you have CP or are a parent of someone with CP it is really important to empower yourself with information on pain including what causes it and options for treatment. You need to work out what is causing the pain not just mask it with pain medication.
Communication isn't just about building words. It's about making an effort so that the student has that self-confidence to be a good communicator, so that we have that one-on-one partnership of communication.
We all have different towns and we all have different things that we do in the course of the day. It may be that the student is a great artist or a great writer. When it comes to assistive technology we have to think about what is going to give that student the ability to do what they love without having to see roadblocks and go, "I can't do that”. There are so many tools out there, whether it's a communication app, a video app, a math tool. With assistive technology you are not making the student into what you want them to be.
