From the August 28, 2015 Psych Central World of Psychology blog.

How Teachers Make a Difference by Jeffrey Deitz

In clinical practice, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists are usually so consumed with treating psychopathology they don’t often get the chance to prevent it.

A dear friend, a teacher visiting from the Midwest, explained how she turned a potentially explosive situation with one of her students into a story with a wonderful ending.

Claire Keller is a sixth-grade reading teacher from Evanston, Illinois. She’s the kind of teacher everyone had once in their lives; or if not, they wished they had. Claire’s the enthusiastic encourager who relishes seeing her students “get it.” She sees teaching as a privilege, not just a job. She makes reading exciting; encourages you to use your imagination and write down your ideas; to believe in yourself and your power of communication. Decades later you might not remember a single book you read in her class, but you remember she made you feel special, and that you finished the year feeling reading could be fun, not just a drudge.

Teachers like Claire didn’t just forcefeed books because that’s what the school system selected. She found stories that were relevant and made discussions lively. By the time you finished a year in her class, you knew yourself better

Many of Claire’s students in Illinois came from families temporarily assigned to the big city, uprooted from rural America into an alien culture. RJ (short for Rosemary Jane), one of Claire’s transplants, was a gangly 11-year-old girl from Louisiana. Back home she was a tomboyish Becky Thatcher. She and her Tom Sawyer of a best friend loved shooting Coke cans at fifty feet. In Chicago, however, RJ tried too hard to be included. Between the way she dressed and her hunting and fishing stories, she put people off. The more she tried, the worse it got.

Claire had her students work in foursomes using a password-protected computer platform. One morning, a popular clique of girls collaborating on a one-act play opened their file to find graphic threats, the content so disturbing the police were notified.

Techno-savvy investigators traced the hacker to RJ’s home Wi-Fi. With expulsion and criminal charges pending, RJ’s parents were summoned to meet the authorities, a conference Claire attended. RJ’s parents knew something was wrong — to them, her personality had deteriorated almost overnight — but trying to engage her about what was upsetting just made her more monosyllabic and brooding. They didn’t know what to do.

Claire did. She took RJ aside. At first, RJ denied everything. Then Claire grasped her hands and looked her in the eye. “I know what’s been happening,” she told her. “I understand.” RJ broke into tears, recounting overhearing the popular crowd trash-talking her for being a country hick. She felt crushed, which is why she struck back. She was ashamed and mortified she had upset so many people.

Claire prevailed on the authorities to back off on expulsion proceedings long enough for her to work with RJ on friend-making; on how Chicago was different from home. Claire coached RJ about local mores, and enlisted someone from the popular crowd to mediate her acceptance into the group.

Amazingly — and this really happened — a year later, RJ had turned into a happy camper, cavorting with her new buddies like nothing happened. She even taught her new best friend how to shoot!

Without Claire’s empathy and intervention, which most people would consider exceptional, someone like RJ easily could have been saddled with stigmatizing diagnoses such as oppositional defiant disorder or antisocial personality disorder and banished to a therapeutic school. Imagine what would have happened had life taken that tack.

This is what happens when individuals like Claire, on the front lines, are tuned into their students’ emotional issues. Parents, pediatricians, daycare providers, teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, clergy, dorm supervisors, camp counselors and the police — everyone in position to spot danger signals in youngsters — needs education about psychological development and its disorders. Were a child seizing or vomiting, he would be sent to the nurse, someone trained to differentiate health from illness. The same should hold with emotional distress.

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel is on board. “Educators must see that students aren’t neglected or mislabeled, that every student gets specialized attention,” he said, adding, “that means extensive coursework in adolescent development and psychology prior to entering the classroom, as well as professional development throughout one’s career.”

Would RJ’s life have spiraled downwardly out of control? Fortunately, we’ll never know. The Hebrew Talmud says that to save a life is to save the world. Claire Keller did her part. Let’s do ours.

Note: details were altered considerably to preserve confidentiality.

It’s your turn #5 is a situation that often perplexes parents of adolescents. You’ll find a typical example in the subplot of my novel Intensive Therapy: A Novel.

Your teen-aged fraternal twin son and daughter want to spend several weeks of their summer at music camp. Even though you can afford it, you think it would be good for them to pay for part of it with money they earn during the school year, but they claim they’re too stressed by all their activities, homework, and community service work to take on a job. The children have adopted a “divide and conquer” strategy that has you and your spouse arguing about what’s best for the children. What next?

TOP COMMENTS:

Marylou Porras The parents have to be one in mind regarding the future of their children. I would think that the education goals would be a priority,and if adding music camp to their already full schedule is of great benefit then they should consider the investment as well spent. The children do need to learn responsibility, it seems to me that they are showing absence of responsibility by acknowledging the fact that they have a full and stressful schedule.maybe doing some compromise regarding their community involvement might allow them some time to work and earn some of the funds needed

Anthonette Lee I most certainly would let them know that although it may seem right now that dad an I are divided , we are on the same side. Dont try to divide us. Been their done that. And while Im giving the kids that part of my mind my husband would look at my face and say to himself , oh shit I think I better agree with her right about now or My ass is grass. Then we would pay for camp, like parents should but they would pay for the extras

Response to and from commentators:

Jeffrey Deitz: Parents are unanimous: don’t let the children play one of against the other. It can be tough to say, “No” to your kids, but parents aren’t there to be friends.

Children must learn to pitch in and compromise, attributes needed to form stable and enriching relationships. The family unit is the breeding ground of these life skills. It’s great to do community service, but as is often said, “Charity begins at home.” When parents don’t model saying, “No,” or “We need to find a workable compromise,” children don’t learn how to say, “No,” to themselves or come to terms with the notion that compromise is not a win-lose situation.

From https://www.facebook.com/IntensiveTherapyANovel?ref=hl

July 2, 2015

Welcome to the page’s new interactive feature called “It’s your turn,” where you get to be the therapist. FYI, all the situations are hypotheticals; no one’s confidentiality is compromised. Here’s the situation: you’re treating a 17 year old girl with cutting behavior and poor impulse control who “fired” her last therapist for telling her mother that she (the patient) was planning to snort heroin. Today, she (the patient) says she’s planning on seducing one of her teachers who she thinks has a crush on her.
You’re the therapist. What would you say or do?

There’s no one right answer. Most imaginative response wins a signed first edition of Intensive Therapy: A Novel. Feel free to share with your friends.

Inside Inside Out Jeffrey Deitz MD

My wife and I spent rainy day watching the new Disney Pixar movie Inside Out, an animated feature that takes movie-goers inside the mind of an eleven year old girl named Riley. Riley is overwhelmed with anger and sadness when her family uproots her from an idyllic life in Minnesota and moves to the strange environment of urban San Francisco. To make matters worse, Riley’s father’s business begins to fail and the high cost of living necessitates living in a dreary fixer-upper. As if nothing else could go wrong, the moving van gets lost and Riley is disconnected from the comforts of home that might help ease the transition.
In the movie—and this is something that animation can present extremely effectively—the core of Riley’s inner life is represented as place within Riley’s mind aptly named Command Central. Five basic emotions, each embodied by a character, jockey for control: “Joy” (who looks and acts like a bossy Tinkerbell) is used to controlling of Riley, whose parents need to see her as Happy Girl. They either don’t get, or cannot accept, that Riley—like all youngsters—is a mixture of emotions.
This is a powerful and imaginative way to portray the relationship between a person’s outside, and what’s going on inside their deeper emotional life.
As a result of the abrupt change in Riley’s life, Joy—who is used to dominating Riley’s inner life—loses control. Up until this point in Riley’s emotional development Joy is the protagonist, who sees Sadness as an antagonist whose very existence is a threatens Riley’s emotional stability.
The dramatic tension in the movie arises as Joy recognizes the importance of Sadness (who looks and acts like Lucy Brown with a permanent puss), Anger, Disgust, and Fear, all of whom want their say in controlling Riley’s dreams and behavior. As Riley sinks into depression, Joy and Sadness become separated from Command Central, and Riley’s inner world—represented by islands of good coping such as friendship (Riley’s best friend from home makes her jealous when it looks like Riley can be easily replaced), athleticism (Riley’s an excellent ice-hockey player who loses her confidence and temper om the new hockey team), and family ties (Riley’s father misinterprets his daughter’s sullenness and punishes her for having a bad attitude), crumbles piece by piece. In effect, she loses herself.
What makes the movie ring true emotionally is Joy’s poignant realization that she needs Sadness if Riley is to come to terms with the emotional chaos she faces. What a paradox!—and one whose implication all children (and their parents) need to accept: that in order in to meet the challenges inherent in life’s travails, Joy and Sadness must learn not to just coexist, but to cooperate. Without them, adaptation to change becomes impossible.
Long time ago in 1914, Sigmund Freud penned a classic paper entitled Mourning and Melancholia, in which he took up the subject of grief and depression. Although his theory of depression was misguided, he was right on in recognizing that grief—the feelings of sadness about the loss of a deeply cherished, unambivalent attachment (or in Riley’s case several attachments)—is as central to mental well-being as is scab formation to wound healing. Grief hurts; but it also heals. To avoid the pain of grief is to invite depression and despair. In Inside Out, it is only when Joy lets Sadness take the lead in a moving scene where Riley and her parent share their sadness with each other, that Riley’s psyche reconstitutes, and we see Riley calling on her Inside strengths, to give her confidence that she can meet the challenges coming from without.

Jeffrey Deitz MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Connecticut and New York City. For years Deitz wrote for the professional about psychotherapy; he also conducted seminars at international conferences about the role of psychotherapy in treating PTSD and Bipolar Disorder. In 2010, he began publishing in the New York Times and Huffington Post about sports psychology, the power of psychotherapy, and the public health risk of sleep deprivation. Deitz’s first novel, Intensive Therapy: A Novel, a fiction about the life-saving relationship between a psychiatrist and patient has recently been published. For more information visit: www.jeffreydeitz.com.

Having had the good fortune of taking writer and teacher extraordinaire William Zinsser’s last class on memoire at The New School, it is a privilege to reprint this review of his classic book On Writing Well which I posted recently on Goodreads.

How did Intensive Therapy: A Novel come to be written? How does any author decide how and when to write his first book? Read on and I’ll share the key moments in my personal and professional development that made this book come to life.