In Honor of Children’s Mental Health, Please visit our Storywalk at these locations:

West Springfield Public Library

200 Park St., West Springfield, MA

(May 7th-May14th)

&

Holyoke Heritage State Park

221 Appleton St., Holyoke MA

(May 14th-May28th)

Anna Dellarosa, at left, is raising her three great-nieces in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Gretchen Emond is co-director of The Support Network, which assists families in navigating the mental health care system.
BEN JAMES / NEPM

By Ben James, April 15 2021

Gretchen Emond and Anna Dellarosa have a relationship forged from years of common experience.

“We are parents with lived experience raising a child with a mental health challenge,” said Emond, a family support therapist and co-director of The Support Network, which assists families in the difficult task of navigating the mental health system.

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Kristal Applebee, the executive director, stressed the importance of combatting racial injustice in the workplace and our everyday lives.

Racism divides – we must unite in combatting it by not being silent, and by investing in educating ourselves, having courageous conversations, and dismantling systems that perpetuate it while assuring measures of accountability are in place and upheld. Today, not only do we re-commit to our work on inclusion – we also commit to actively valuing and creating a culture of anti-racism and vigilantly combatting injustice.

Read the Consortium’s full statement on addressing racial injustice here.

For families seeking to learn and delve more deeply into anti-racism work, an anti-racism resource guide has been developed by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein. It includes learning resources for individuals as well as parents seeking to support and explore the discussion of racial injustice with their families.

Parenting Resource Handbook Support for Survivor Parents Breaking the Cycle of Abuse One Day at a Time

MA Appleseed has prepared this Parent Guide to help families who are facing problems resulting from a child’s discipline by, or exclusion from, school. When your child is disciplined by his or her school, it is important that you – as the child’s parent or guardian – understand: • Why is your child being disciplined? • What action is the school taking to discipline your child? • What steps can you take in order to help your child? • How can you limit the impact that the discipline has on your child’s education? Parents know that a child’s ability to learn and succeed in school can be harmed when that child is excluded from the classroom or punished in another way. When this happens, the most important thing you can do is become involved. As a parent you are your child’s best, and sometimes only, advocate. MA Appleseed has developed this Parent Guide to help you navigate through the discipline process. In it, we discuss the different types of disciplinary actions schools can take and ways to advocate for your child. We also provide detailed information in laymen’s terms on the legal framework that applies to different types of offenses and the range of disciplinary actions that may be taken, such as suspension and expulsion.   Continue reading….

Dr. Nicole Brown’s quest to understand her misbehaving pediatric patients began with a hunch.

Brown was completing her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, when she realized that many of her low-income patients had been diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

These children lived in households and neighborhoods where violence and relentless stress prevailed. Their parents found them hard to manage and teachers described them as disruptive or inattentive. Brown knew these behaviors as classic symptoms of ADHD, a brain disorder characterized by impulsivity, hyperactivity, and an inability to focus.

When Brown looked closely, though, she saw something else: trauma. Hyper-vigilance and dissociation, for example, could be mistaken for inattention. Impulsivity might be brought on by a stress response in overdrive.

“Despite our best efforts in referring them to behavioral therapy and starting them on stimulants, it was hard to get the symptoms under control,” she said of treating her patients according to guidelines for ADHD. “I began hypothesizing that perhaps a lot of what we were seeing was more externalizing behavior as a result of family dysfunction or other traumatic experience.”

Continue Reading this article at The Atlantic.