Whoever coined the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” was mistaken. In reality, broken bones will mend, and bruises will fade, but a person with a broken and bruised spirit will likely carry those wounds for many years. Just because the injuries don’t show, does not mean that they do not exist, do not hurt, or do not matter.


Verbal abuse can occur in any type of relationship. Parent/Child, Boss/Employee, Caretaker/Patient; Teacher/Student . . . But regardless of who the perpetrator and the victim are, the means and purpose of verbal abuse remain the same. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on verbal abuse which occurs in intimate relationships.


Verbal abuse is as intentional as physical violence. The verbal abuser is aware of what he is doing and can stop at any time. It is a planned tactic. This type of abuse generally does not occur until after a relationship has begun and is well underway. Think about it; if verbal abuse were present at the first date, would there ever be a second one? The verbal abuser can choose to control himself and refrain from verbally assaulting his victim until such a time as he decides it will work to his advantage.

Verbal abuse includes accusations and blame. “You were flirting with him; I saw you!” “You love ____ more than you love me!,” “It’s your fault ___ happened,” “You are selfish, are stupid, are a bad mother, a bad wife . . .” These taunts are attempts to make the victim believe something that is not true. They are also a means of escalation. Who would not defend himself or herself in the face of such accusations? But to offer a defense is to dispute what the accuser has said, so this means of verbal abuse often proceeds to physical abuse.

Verbal abuse may be in the form of threats. Obviously, the abuser will threaten harm to his victim and her loved ones, but ironically, he may also threaten to hurt or kill himself. By the time an abuser resorts to these threats of self harm, the victim has already been conditioned to appeasement and will likely comply. The victim has the real fear that the abuser may actually follow through, and then she will have to live with the guilt of perceived responsibility. This “Do as I say, or you will be sorry” method of verbal abuse is clearly another control tactic.

Clearly, some forms of verbal abuse are easily identifiable as they are vicious assaults of name-calling, insults, or onslaughts of berating another person. Sometimes, verbal abuse is quiet and insidious, though, and may not be recognized as abuse until the victim is ensnared like a fly in the spider’s web. Verbal abuse breaks the spirit and kills the soul. It inflicts the invisible bruises that cannot be presented in court or shown as evidence in order to get the help the victim needs. In this way, verbal abuse can be more harmful than physical assault.

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If you, or someone you know needs immediate help, please call our 24 hour crisis line: 1-800-263-3247

 Even Facebook agrees that social media can be bad for your mental health. And research by the Department of Education has found that the mental well-being of teenage girls in the UK is worsening, with the impact of social media cited as the cause.

    Yet my research reveals that more people are turning to these platforms for help with their mental health issues. This has been exacerbated as the crisis in the NHS sees waiting times for appointments grow. While most of the people I spoke to believed social media helped them, there is a concern that it could be adding to ongoing mental health problems.
 
Mental health has recently become the focus of attention within UK policy, with the proposed rehash of the Mental Health Act, and the new Power Threat Meaning framework, which aims to reduce the “medicalisation” of mental health. Despite raised awareness of some the issues, more and more people are turning away from their GPs as they fail to get the support they need. This is usually due to lengthy waiting lists for counselling, or a tendency to overly rely on prescribing medication as a cure all. Written by Kim Heyes
Research Associate, Manchester Metropolitan University

Sooooo, what do you think? 

Many of these people turn to online support, which in recent years has been through the medium of anonymised peer-to-peer community forums. This has evolved and people with mental ill-health are now turning to social media to “out” their health issues.
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​But social media’s relationship with mental health is controversial. If even Facebook is telling us that being on social media can be bad for our health, why are people using it to create support networks?
Celebrity social media “outings” have also helped to raise awareness. Last year, Sinead O’Connor publicly posted a video of herself on social media where she was clearly in need of support. She said it was her hope “that this video is somehow helpful”, using the hashtag #OneOfMillions. Her post sparked discussions about the “right way” of asking for help, but the debate by no means came up with any answers.

Today is National Mental Health Day. I choose today to share my journey only because this week was a breaking point for me. If you could imagine a quiet mind, contented feeling. Able to fully concentrate on whatever you are doing now and living in only that moment. That is what it is like to not be depressed. Being in the mental health field, I assumed that this is something I can work on myself. I was ashamed to counsel others and then go to Dr. Nottingham right after my sessions. In addition, if people would ask if I was okay? I would start crying… “I am thinking, what the hell is wrong with you woman?.” I would call it the smiling depression. How many people do you imagine look happy but struggle with depressive thoughts on a daily basis? Typically, depressed people are depicted as being bed-ridden and incapable of functioning. Hence, I always use the campaign “Stop the Stigma”. What may or may not be surprising is, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 10 percent of the United States population is suffering from depression, which is 10 times more than those suffering from bipolar disorder (1 percent) and schizophrenia (1 percent). So back to me,  I suffered with depression not even knowing I did. People talked about my accolades and the honorable mentions, but I honestly was numb to all feelings until I had my daughter. I begin to become more focus and protective over her. Moreover, even with my legal separation, I was a mamma bear to the fullest. That is when my awakening begin, that I had either some existential childhood issues, that needed to be dealt with, with those involved or privately. I never knew about financial budgeting, I did not know about credit scores, or the effect of sex besides “going to hell”. If people think abuse is only physical than they are sadly mistaken, but I did not know that either. My mind has been in a battle since a young age. Therefore, I begin taking courses and finding voids such as education. I began to become licensed in the field that I understood more, mental health. I begin to empower others that I can catch before ending up at age 67 “finally discovering themselves”
Being depressed is not easy to deal with; it completely changes your perception of everything in your life. To be not depressed is to lift the veil of negativity that holds you back from living. This veil contains all of the negative emotions such as sadness, fear and anger. It is hard to lift the veil, but once it is lifted and you get a peak of life without these emotions, you realize how pointless wearing that veil truly is, and how beautiful life is when you look at it through the spectrum of appreciation, excitement, and awe. Everybody is affected by negative emotion, but to not be depressed is to not let these emotions consume your life, and choosing to instead focus on positivity. Every day is a fight against negative thought. To not be depressed is to learn techniques that you can use every day to ensure you are winning that fight. These techniques are different for everybody. For me, I found that being more active and healthy helped, as well as meditating to clear my mind when I find I am being consumed by thought. I also write in a journal to sort out my feelings during times when I am feeling a negative emotion such as fear, anger and sadness. I still feel all of these emotions, but I am not depressed because I have found strategies to help me recover from them super-fast, when those time feel like I was about to lose it. I wanted to share a little of story because there is much more, but I am a face that was clinical diagnose with depression/ptsd and some people would not even know only because of my outside appearance. Today is Mental Health Day, let us begin talking about it and stop the STIGMA. When you get a physical checkup, please go and grab a mental health checkup. As a school administrator currently I do miss the counseling side, but in order for me to help others, I have to help myself...#depressionhasnoimage #thatfeltgood #imnotperfect#imnotrichonlyinthepsirit 
-Signing off,
Mental health counselor/school administrator

Please share your thoughts or experience ....

Anxiety
​From puberty through age 50, women are more than twice as likely as men to develop an anxiety disorder, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, with its symptoms of increased worrying, tension, exhaustion, and fear.
Again, so many factors come into play—including social and cultural norms and stressors, but how we react to them may be the biggest difference between men and women. That's the key finding of a 2012 study in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Abnormal Psychology: Men tend to externalize emotions while women tend to internalize them.
Biology plays a role, too, of course, and researchers are increasingly looking at the effects of estradiol, a primary gonadal hormone in women. "It is thought to mediate, or be responsible for, some of the sex differences observed in psychiatric disorders," explains Tamar Gur, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral health, neuroscience, obstetrics, and gynecology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

Depression
​Some 10 to 15% of women will experience depression at some point in their lives—double the number of men who will. "Women go through significant biological changes across their lifespan, more so than men, so these cyclic shifts can disrupt, malfunction, or create disease," Serani explains.
Hormonal flux in particular can wreak havoc on women's mental health. "Hormones play a significant role around the time of childbirth, which has resulted in terms like postpartum blues and postpartum depression," says Jared Heathman, MD, a family psychiatrist in Houston, Texas. Women can also develop premenstrual dysphoric disorder. "Symptoms of PMDD are similar to major depressive disorder, so it's likely that some physicians label PMDD as MDD," Heathman says. "Their acronyms are even similar."

Transgenerational trauma is trauma that is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors via complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms.

It is a continuous challenge living with depression and anxiety, now posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and I've suffered from it for most of my life.  I can look back now and gently laugh at all the people who thought I had the perfect life. I was young, beautiful, and talented, but unbeknownst to them, I was terrorized by an undiagnosed debilitating mental illness.

Having been properly diagnosed with depression at age 29, I know that there is not one aspect of my life that has gone untouched by this. My PTSD was triggered by several traumas, including a childhood laced with physical, mental, spiritual and sexual abuse.  For me there was no safe place in the world, not even my home at sometimes. As I went through my divorce I started doing a spiritual fast and begin to become more transparent with myself and generational trauma, from my mother and father side.  I begin to realize that this was not about me but from generation before me.... I've been in counseling for 5 years and to this day, I am still learning more about the mind and how our genes play a strong role in our life. 

Researchers have shown that vulnerability to posttraumatic stress can be passed down biologically from one generation to the next. These findings provide scientific explanations for how PTSD extends beyond the individual, reaching into family lineages, ultimately impacting entire communities and the larger society.

One common finding among all the studies presented here, is that low cortisol levels in the body chemistry make us more vulnerable to developing posttraumatic stress symptoms. Cortisol, which is the hormone linked to management of stress and trauma, can be depleted in the mother due to exposure to traumatic events such as 9/11, the Holocaust, domestic violence or emotional abuse, poverty, housing, financial and food insecurity. The mother, through this exposure to extreme stress, burns through her cortisol reserves and significantly increases her vulnerability to developing PTSD.

The Research…
Groups of research studies were carried out that examined:

• Children of parents who had experienced the Holocaust
• Children of mothers who survived the World Trade Center attack
• Infants whose mothers had a history of early-life sexual and physical abuse
• Comparing biological impacts from mother versus father... In one study, researchers aimed to find out if the impact of a mother’s traumatic experiences was more significant than that of the father’s.

​The study of the transmission of PTSD from generation to generation could lead to more personal insight into one’s own individual case, greater understanding from healing professionals, employers, educators, law enforcement, as well as scientific advances, such as the ability to scientifically measure the impact of trauma to individuals (including service-related PTSD disability determination for military service members), families, and society over time.

For me there is no cure, no final healing. But there are things I can do to ensure that I never have to suffer as I did before being diagnosed with PTSD. I'm no longer at the mercy of my disorder and I would not be here today had I not had the proper diagnosis and treatment. The most important thing to know is that it's never too late to seek help.
Please check out this book that I read the other day at Barnes and Nobles:

It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycleby Mark Wolynn

Some References
The study was conducted by two universities; first is the Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences in Sari, Iran. The other is the Medical University of the Americas, Charlestown, Saint Kitts and Nevis (in the Caribbean). The article is titled A review on the evidence of transgenerational transmission of posttraumatic stress disorder vulnerability. The researchers are Seyyed Taha Yahyavi,1 Mehran Zarghami,1 Urvashi Marwah2.

Perkonigg A, Kessler RC, Storz S, Wittchen HU. Traumatic events and posttraumatic stress disorder in the community: Prevalence, risk factors, and comorbidity. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2000;101:46-59.

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