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Does My Child Have PTSD? Releases This Week!

Does My Child Have PTSD? Releases This Week!

Gravel Road's celebrating the release of Does My Child Have PTSD? and its Publishers Weekly starred review with s book give away. Enter by leaving a comment.Life’s getting more and more exciting on our little Gravel Road these days. Not only is October 13 the official release date for Does My Child Have PTSD? What to Do When Your Child Is Hurting from the Inside Out, but the book also received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. You can read the entire review at Publishers Weekly or celebrate with me right here on our gravel road where I’m showing off the sentence I like best.

Philo can make a dramatic statement (e.g., trauma “changes the very structure of the brain”) and then evenly explain the physiology behind it. Though occasionally heart-wrenching, the book is organized so simply and logically as to be easy to follow and digest. ~ Publishers Weekly

Would you please join me in praying that the review increases its visibility so it gets into the hands of families who need it?

Also, if you’re part of a family who could use the book, or would like to give it to someone, Gravel Road is hosting a book give away. To enter, leave a comment in the box below about why you’d like to win between today, October 12, 2015 and midnight on October 31, 2015. The give away is limited to residents of the United States and Canada.

Why Bonbons and Blog Posts Don’t Matter So Much

Why Bonbons and Blog Posts Don’t Matter So Much

Bonbons

The past few weeks have been filled with a buzz of activity at our house. Hiram’s siding the garage and reprising his Man of Steel role in preparation for Dam to Dam in a few weeks. My time’s been divided between correcting proofs for The Caregiver’s Notebook and conducting interviews for a book about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children. Throw high school graduation season into the mix and, like I said, things are buzzing around here.

No time for sitting around and eating bon bons.

And hardly time, as has been mentioned in other blog posts this week, for writing new blog posts either. But enough time to contemplate yesterday’s guest post by Maggie Gale over at www.DifferentDream.com, my website for parents of kids with special needs.

Maggie’s post is an amazing story about her daughter Lois.

Lois had a TE/EAF repair shortly after birth, the same anomaly and repair our son had. In her post Maggie describes how Lois remembered and grieved about those early events. Ten years ago, I would have poo-pooed her story, but not anymore. Not after our son was treated for PTSD caused by his early medical experiences.

Kids remember more and further back than we think.

Traumatic memories remain especially vivid and affect our children more than we want to believe. Which is why my days are filled reading books about PTSD ink kids, with interviews of parents who have kids with PTSD, and of experts who treat kids with it.

Even though I’d rather be eating bon bons and writing funny blog posts.

So today, instead of an original and finely crafted post, I’d like to direct you to Maggie Gale’s guest post, Do Kids Experience Grief about Their Special Needs. It’s more disturbing than funny. More heart-wrenching than hilarious. And important enough to the well-being of children to make bonbon and blog posting sacrifices seem as insignificant as they really are.

Photo Credit: John Kasawa at www.freedigitalphotos.net

The Danger of Self-Diagnosis

The Danger of Self-Diagnosis

During January and February, my days were consumed with research for a new book proposal about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in kids. Consequently, I learned just enough about several mental illnesses to endanger my own state of mind. All this new information sent me into a tizzy of worry and self-diagnosis, resulting in the following list:

  1. The great pleasure I find in the order and symmetry of the picture above is a sure sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
  2. My penchant for list making could be another sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or it could be a coping mechanism I employ to hide early onset Alzheimer’s.
  3. I probably have an eating disorder because one of the marks of an eating disorder is obsessively thinking about food. And I think of food at least three times a day, sometimes more.
  4. Kids can be traumatized in many ways, and one of them must have happened to me during childhood so I must have PTSD.
  5. Taking out all the garbage, cleaning the bathrooms, doing the laundry, and emptying the dishwasher before going on vacation points to a yet undiscovered, reverse housecleaning phobia which I hope they name “Philophobia” after me.
  6. The desire to name a mental illness after myself pretty much proves I have a  narcissistic complex.
  7. All this worrying about having a mental illness points to an anxiety disorder, don’t you think?

Believe me, that list is only the tip of the mental illness iceberg. If everything I’ve self-diagnosed was on that list, you’d think I was crazy. But I’m not.

8.  Time to add self-delusion to the list.