2nd annual suicide prevention walk & picnic. This year we have leased the amphitheater in the park for an all day event. We have a honorary guest  (Heather Hays) to perform a Rose Ceremony after the walk. Heather will also be signing her book regarding her own experinces. We have several local bands who will be performing through out the day as well. We want everyone to bring their food, drinks, blankets and chairs to relax and remember those we have lost.
 

Registration starts at 8:00, the walk begins at 9:00am!

Event URL:
http://www.outofthedarkness.org

Event Contact:
Beth Castricone
469-556-0787]]> http://heatherhays.com/blog/index.php?itemid=426 Mon, 8 Oct 2007 13:49:50 -0500 http://heatherhays.com/blog/index.php?itemid=424

Teen CONTACT Conference

"Let's Talk About It"

Saturday, September 22, 2007

CONTACT Crisis Line and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra will partner to co-host the first Teen CONTACT Conference on Saturday, September 22, 2007 at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

About the Conference:

The Teen CONTACT Conference is designed specifically for educators, counselors, Fine Arts teachers, teen youth leaders, clinicians, parents and teens.  Sessions will cover current teen issues such as anger management, bullying and mean girls, hands-on internet safety class, drugs (cheese) and alcohol, school violence and safety and teen dating violence. Teen CONTACT's Gatekeeper Training Program and sessions on the effects of music and depression will also be presented.

Click here for more details.

I'll be giving a talk at the conference and so will lots of other folks - join us if you can.

Btw little Emmy is now over 5 months old and is the sweetest, happiest little girl. She is such a joy to be around. But now that she's getting a little bigger I will do better keeping up the website.

Lots of events are coming up over the next several weeks. I will post them here and on the calendar shortly. Thanks for your support.

 ]]> http://heatherhays.com/blog/index.php?itemid=424 Thu, 20 Sep 2007 23:36:08 -0500 http://heatherhays.com/blog/index.php?itemid=423 Policy Advisor
OFFICE OF REPRESENTATIVE PATRICK J. KENNEDY
 
407 Cannon House Office Building | Washington , DC 20515
Ph. (202) 225.4911 | Fax (202) 225.3290 

Leading The News
 
By Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-R.I.)
 
July 24, 2007
 
Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among young people. More than two-thirds of youth in the juvenile justice system have diagnosable mental illnesses. By any measure, mental health problems have a devastating impact on
America ’s children. It is time for Congress to give this crisis the attention it warrants.

Many Americans believe that if their child were to require a specialist in children’s mental health assessment and treatment, a suitable provider would be but a phone call away, much like their pediatrician. Too many parents I have encountered have discovered the painful and frustrating reality that even children in crisis are often told to wait months for an appointment.

As a result, each year tens of thousands of parents make the heart-wrenching choice to turn over custody of their children to state bureaucrats as the only way of ensuring their treatment. Others see their children arrested — among the 80 percent of juvenile offenders with mental illnesses. Still others pay the ultimate price, burying children who might have lived had they only had proper treatment.

These tragedies occur because we have ignored the call to action from our nation’s leading experts in the field of children’s mental health. Expert panels like the president’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health have warned of crippling shortages of clinicians, especially in rural areas and among certain specialties, such as those with expertise in trauma and child abuse, school and community violence, eating disorders and autism.

The Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act (H.R. 2073) will help bring new professionals into the pipeline.  The bill creates educational incentives such as grants, scholarships and loan forgiveness programs to encourage more professionals to enter and remain in child and adolescent mental health. It would also support institutions of higher learning in their efforts to enhance and prioritize children’s mental health issues in their curriculum and training opportunities.

While legislation like the Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act must be a component of any comprehensive approach, it is not the entire solution. The shortage in child mental health care providers exists not only because there are too few specialists in this field, but also because there are too many children who require their services. To address that problem, we must focus not only on treatment, but also prevention.

Fortunately, there is a tremendous amount of research that provides insight into the specific causes of childhood mental illness. The Kaiser Foundation’s Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, for example, demonstrates that a child who has witnessed serious violence, lives in a household with an alcoholic or drug addict, or whose mother is clinically depressed is at high risk of developing mental health or substance abuse disorders later in life. It shows us that children with such risk factors are twice as likely to become alcoholics as children with no risk factors and four times more likely to commit suicide. The Human Genome Project and the National Children’s Study, which needs stronger congressional support, offer the prospect of further explaining how and why certain children develop mental illnesses and other diseases.

We can and should use this knowledge to proactively seek out at-risk youth and implement early interventions that will reduce costs, both human and economic, down the road. Despite our growing understanding of the science associated with childhood mental illness, however, states constantly struggle to find federal dollars to implement proven interventions.
Instead, health programs like SCHIP and Medicaid base eligibility largely on family income, to the exclusion of other known risk factors.  Few federal programs are geared toward prevention or early intervention, and those that are have not incorporated the recent explosion in science about children’s brain development.

Rather than wait for the painful downstream consequences of inaction, states should be given the freedom to target children on the basis of known risk factors. Legislation that I will soon be introducing would give states the flexibility to directly target Medicaid services to those young children who are at the greatest risk. Furthermore, it would allow states to provide the kinds of family-based, early intervention services that we know are effective but that the federal government has been slow to embrace.

The existing Foundations for Learning program at the Department of Education similarly makes competitive grants to community organizations that provide family-based early education services to these same children, but has been woefully underfunded. In its first year, Foundations for Learning received 158 applications for only four grants. This program should be fully reauthorized in this year’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization and better funded in the future.

We are currently failing children and their families twice: ignoring science that can help keep children healthy and then rationing treatment when they get sick. The challenges are great, but the opportunities for improvement are abundant. We just need the foresight and political will to pursue them.

Kennedy is a member of the House Appropriations Committee.

 ]]> http://heatherhays.com/blog/index.php?itemid=423 Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:17:10 -0500 http://heatherhays.com/blog/index.php?itemid=422

A friend of mine in California is hosting a workshop to help heal bereaved children. She sent me an email with this information. If you know someone in need, I think it might be a great workshop to attend.

Wednesday September 5, 2007
8:00 am to 4:30 pm
Sharp HealthCare Auditorium
8695 Spectrum Center Blvd
San Diego, CA 92123

This one-day interactive workshop will provide professional clinicians and counselors with useful information on how to support a child following the death of a loved one. The morning will provide you with education on the special needs of bereaved children and tools to facilitate the expression of their grief. In the interactive afternoon session you will be introduced to the use of imagery healing tools, which encourage children to use their imagination and creativity to facilitate coping strategies in their grief process.

Course Objectives:

1. Helping Children Deal with Grief
2. Creative Expressions for the Grieving Child
3. The Healing Power of Children’s Imagination: Nine Tools for Treatment

Workshop Schedule:
8:00 - Registration
8:30 - Welcome, Randye Golden-Grant, Bereavement Counselor, Sharp HospiceCare
8:45 - Helping Children Deal with Grief, Laura Grayson, MSW, Supervisor of Bereavement and Social Services, Sharp HospiceCare
10:15 - Break
10:30 - Creative Expressions for the Grieving Child, Colleen Linnertz, MA, Bereavement Counselor, Sharp HospiceCare
12:00 - Lunch
1:00 - The Healing Power of Children’s Imagination: Nine Tools for Treatment, Charlotte Reznick, Ph.D., Educational Psychologist, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, UCLA
3:45 - Questions
4:15 - Conclusion and Evaluations

CEU Credit: Seven hours of Continuing Education Units (CEUs) provided by Sharp HospiceCare. Board of Behavioral Sciences: PCE427. Board of Registered Nursing: CEP13040.

Fee Information: The registration fee of $100 includes lunch, workshop materials, and seven CEUs.

To enroll please call 1-800-82-SHARP (1-800-827-4277), Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM.