As a lifelong overachiever, I always thought I could handle stress well. In my early years of high school, I juggled varsity sports, music, clubs, debate, work, and a busy social life, all while maintaining straight A’s. I had dreamt of attending an Ivy League university since I was 12, and in high school, I did everything in my power to make that a reality…
For the last 25 years, there has been progressively greater interest, from clinicians as well as researchers, in the prevention of psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia. As a result, programs have been established worldwide to treat young people who are at higher risk for developing psychosis, often referred to as “clinical high risk.” This summer, the Resilience and Prevention Program and the Psychosis Clinical and Research Program of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry partnered to create the Resilience Evaluation-Social Emotional Training (RE-SET) Program. RE-SET is a specialized outpatient program…
Mental health disorders such as ADHD, depression, and anxiety are routinely screened for in pediatric practices (1), so that children and adolescents who may have these conditions receive the help they need as soon as possible. However, psychotic symptoms that are “subclinical” – that are not severe enough to be considered a true psychotic symptom but are similar in content to a psychotic symptom—are not typically assessed by pediatricians…
As with most medical illnesses, risk for mental health problems depends both on things we can control, and things we cannot. Primary care doctors tell us that our risk for having a heart attack is increased if we are older, or if we have a family history of heart problems – but also if we are overweight, smoke…
Advances in the prevention of medical illnesses have transformed the human experience and lengthened the human life span by several decades during the past two centuries (1). Examples of these advances include modern sanitation and clean water initiatives, early childhood and adult vaccines, antibiotics, and more recently, the range of clinical tools used for the early detection and prevention of heart disease and many types of cancer (2).
Psychiatry, however, has lagged behind other fields of medicine in the domain of prevention, despite the fact that psychiatric disorders are extremely common…
