No Shit, Sherlock: "Deporting Parents Hurts Kids"

It concerns me that this distinction is an issue: families being torn apart by the Immigration Deportation regime. How can it be so taxing to differentiate between families and violent criminals. I have multiple client families where one parent of a child with a disability has been deported, or lost in detention for months, while their family struggles to get by and wonders where is their loved one. 

Deporting Parents Hurts Kids Op-Ed from the NYTimes, April 21, 2012:

By HIROKAZU YOSHIKAWA and CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO

Read the first few paragraphs here, then follow the link for more: 

"LAST May, President Obama told an audience in El Paso that deportation of immigrants would focus on “violent offenders and people convicted of crimes; not families, not folks who are just looking to scrape together an income.”

Two weeks ago, however, the Department of Homeland Security released a report that flatly belies the new policy.  From January to June 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 46,486 undocumented parents who claimed to have at least one child who is an American citizen.

In contrast, in the entire decade between 1998 and 2007, about 100,000 such parents were removed. The extraordinary acceleration in the dismantling of these families, part of the government’s efforts to meet an annual quota of about 400,000 deportations, has had devastating results.

Research by the Urban Institute and others reveals the deep and irreversible harm that parental deportation causes in the lives of their children. Having a parent ripped away permanently, without warning, is one of the most devastating and traumatic experiences in human development."

More undocumented immigrants have been deported under Obama than any previous administration, without differentiation between violent criminals and other undocumented residents. 


Maria Hinojosa's Frontline documentary, "Lost in Detention." FRONTLINE and the Investigative Reporting Workshop examine the Obama administration’s controversial get-tough immigration policy.

Psychedelics Can Help Patients Face Death

Psychedelics in Palliative Care: 

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death

From the New York Times, August 19, 2012

To help address the crippling, intoxicating fear of death, its anxieties and uncertainties, researchers are opening their minds: "a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths."

'Alive Inside' explores the hidden lives of people with dementia and how to unlock them

Alive Inside

Watch this! See how a man nearly incapacitated by dementia is revivified by music.

StoryCorps listens to a Trans couple

“You said that you were in the wrong body, that you should be a man.”

In 1997, Les (L) and Scott (R) GrantSmith’s marriage was on the rocks. They had been together for 10 years and were raising two children. But Les was hiding something.

Read more and listen to the interview here. 

A nice, short piece from the NYT about what contributes to the successes and the complexities of couples counseling. And the challenges it poses to therapists attempting to do it well.

Does Couples Therapy Work?

"WE’VE all had that horrible experience: you throw a party or invite a couple over for dinner, and they start fighting, right there in front of you — the character assassination, the barely controlled anger, the neurotic transference of their cooled sexual attraction onto, say, the hygiene of the family dog, all of which makes you want to fake choking and hide. Surely bearing witness to couples’ quarrels feels less bad to the pros, those credentialed and compensated marriage and family therapists whose job it is to help significant others work through issues and pain?"

By ELIZABETH WEIL

Published: March 2, 2012

Beware: Individual Therapy Can Harm Your Marriage

How a therapist's error led her to better treatment methods.

Published on February 24, 2012 by Susan Heitler, Ph.D. in Resolution, Not Conflict

Psychological Diagnosis: Dangerous, Desirable, or Both?

How do labels hurt and how can they be helpful?

Published on February 3, 2012 by Susan Heitler, Ph.D. in Resolution, Not Conflict