Working moms are less likely to show symptoms of depression than stay-at-home moms, MSNBC.com reports, citing a new study. Working moms aren’t off the hook, though. Those who are harder on themselves when it come to setting realistic expectations at balancing work and family end up having higher rates of depression than their more laid-back counterparts.

Researchers analyzed survey results from 1,600 married US women between the ages of 22 and 30 who had children at home. The information was collected as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and asked women’s opinions on a series of statements that seemed to hold outdates ideas on working women and family. Researchers then went back and measured levels of depression in the women at age 40.

Overall, women who were employed either full or part time were less likely to be depressed than those who stayed at home. Signs of depression included difficulty concentrating, feeling lonely, sad or restless, having trouble sleeping or getting going in the morning and feeling unable to shake the blues.

But working women surveyed who were less sure about the ability of women to balance careers and family were also less apt to show symptoms of depression than women who thought it was going to be easy to do both, according to the study.

“The findings really point to the mismatch between women’s expectations about their ability to balance work and family. Women still do the bulk of household labor and child care, even when they’re employed full time,” said study author Katrina Leupp, a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Some of the women who think it’s not difficult to work and take care of kids may also be buying into the “supermom” complex — pressuring themselves to be overachievers in all aspects of life, Leupp said.

Treatment experts know that addiction rates are higher for those who suffer from mental health disorders including depression, so the findings are of interest to those who work to treat substance abuse. But treating co-occurring disorders like addiction and mental health issues simultaneously – often referred to as “dual diagnosis treatment” – success rates are higher than regular addiction treatment.

Co-occurring Disorders Treatment

If you or someone you love is in need of substance abuse treatment, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

Think your teens are safe if the alcohol they consume is at home and under your watchful eye? Think again.

A study in the May issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs concluded adult-supervised alcohol use resulted in youth experiencing higher instances of alcohol-related consequences. In fact, it found supervised drinking was not a harm-minimization policy at all.

Harm-minimization vs Zero Tolerance

Parents are worried about their kids binge drinking, driving under the influence or slipping into abuse so they most often take one of two approaches to teen drinking: “harm-minimization” or “zero tolerance.” To test those methods, researchers from the Centre for Adolescent Health in Melbourne, Australia, and the Social Development Research group in Seattle surveyed over 1,900 middle school students, following them for three years.

By eighth grade, 67 percent of the students from Victoria had consumed alcohol with an adult present compared to 35 percent who had done the same from Washington. The researchers also learned 36 percent of Australian ninth graders (compared to 21 percent of American students the same age) had experienced alcohol-related consequences, such as not being able to stop drinking, getting into fights after drinking or having alcohol-induced blackouts.

“I think what the study did give was evidence that a very specific aspect of harm-minimization wasn’t working as they thought, which was this idea that adults should supervise kids drinking,” said Dr. Barbara J. McMorris, University of Minnesota senior research associate and co-author of the research report.

Pouring a glass of wine for your teen or pre-teen at the dinner table may seem responsible, but it turns out that modeling responsible alcohol use at home doesn’t seem to have a carryover effect to teens’ drinking with friends or in other social situations.

An American Medical Association study reported in 2005 that 25 percent of teens acknowledged they had been at a party where underage drinking was occurring in the presence of a parent.

While it can be hard for parents to draw the line, it’s important to remember teen brains haven’t finished developing yet and alcohol affects them differently. So don’t buy into to that age-old manipulation ploy that “everyone’s doing it.” Alcohol-free parties can become the norm if parents put their foot down and help direct their kids to other ways to make a night memorable.

Alcohol Treatment

If you or someone you love is battling an alcohol addiction or co-occurring disorder, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

For years, breakfast has received all the good press, begin touted as “the most important meal of the day,” but it turns out dinner has the real power – at least when it comes to keeping your kids off drugs.

Those who have infrequent family dinners (fewer than three per week) are more than twice as likely to say that they expect to try drugs in the future compared to teens who sit down to eat with their families five to seven times per week, according to a new study titled “The Importance of Family Dinners VI.”

Drug Stats on Dinner Time

The report, issued from The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University revealed that 72 percent of teens think that eating dinner frequently with their parents is very or fairly important. Compared to teens who have frequent family dinners, those who have infrequent family dinners are:

• Twice as likely to have used tobacco
• Almost twice as likely to have used alcohol
• One and half times likelier to have used marijuana

“The message for parents couldn’t be any clearer. With the recent rise in the number of Americans age 12 and older who are using drugs, it is more important than ever to sit down to dinner and engage your children in conversation about their lives, their friends, school — just talk. Ask questions and really listen to their answers,” said Kathleen Ferrigno, CASA’s director of marketing.

One relatively positive finding of the study was that 60 percent of teens report having dinner with their families at least five times a week, a proportion that has remained consistent over the past decade.

Teen Drug Use

If you or a teen you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

More than one in five parents feel ill-equipped to prevent kids from trying drugs and alcohol, according to survey data from Partnership for a Drug-Free America and the MetLife Foundation.

The new data comes from the 2009 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study (PATS), sponsored by MetLife Foundation, which found more than one in five parents feel there is little they can do to prevent their kids from trying drugs (22 percent) and alcohol (27 percent). The survey also found only two in five parents (39 percent) feel strongly that they could immediately stop their kids from using drugs once they’ve started. PATS data released earlier this year also confirmed marked increases in teen use of alcohol, Ecstasy and marijuana, namely those substances that teens are most likely to encounter is social situations.

To help motivate and equip parents to talk with their kids about the dangers of substance abuse, the two organizations are focusing the next phase of their award-winning radio campaign on better preparing parents on ways to safeguard their kids from the risks of drug and alcohol use.

Help on the Radio

To begin an ongoing conversation, the Partnership and MetLife Foundation’s parenting skills campaign will air educational messages on radio stations in local markets nationwide through the end of October 2010. The campaign is backed by online tools and tips for raising drug-free teens.

“It’s crucial that we help parents understand the threats facing teens today, help them be more confident about their ability to make a difference, and equip them with useful resources, which is the purpose of this campaign,” said Steve Pasierb, president of the Partnership.

“By talking with teens about the dangers of drug and alcohol use, parents can help protect their kids and keep them safe,” said Dennis White, president and CEO of MetLife Foundation. “Parents strongly influence the decisions teens make and this campaign provides much-needed tools to help parents feel better equipped to discuss this important health issue with their kids.”

Drug Treatment at La Paloma

Considering the age of the average person seeking treatment is getting younger and younger, the program couldn’t come a moment too soon. If you or someone you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

Addiction doesn’t just affect those who are abusing. It can live on to affect the generations that follow.

When one or both parents suffer from substance abuse or alcoholism, mental health issues or rage, trauma is created. Trauma at an early age – particularly the early developmental stages before the development of the prefrontal cortex — creates stress, which negatively impacts the structure of chemistry of the brain.

The children who experience this kind of trauma don’t even know they’ve been impacted, and tend to believe they will be OK if they leave and create their own families. Instead, these children pass on both the trauma and the fragmented intimate issues they developed as children, according to Kathy Leigh Willis, PhD, director of Malibu Beach Recovery Center.

Secondary Trauma

Secondary trauma is carried by the children and passed on to their own offspring creating a generation impacted by anxiety and depression. Worse yet, these children are uniquely set up to find that alcohol and other drugs help alleviate these symptoms temporarily.

This can lead to the traumatic events being constantly experienced as if they were happening in the present. This then can produce a pattern of prolonged periods of acute arousal followed by physical and mental exhaustion. Following this, emotional exhaustion leads to distraction making clear thinking difficult or impossible. They express that trauma through emotional detachment (numbing out), seeming emotionally flat, distant, cold, or they may be super controlling, hyper vigilant (anxiety), suffer sleep problems or sever stress.

Because this isn’t just a psychological issue but a neurological problem, a neurological solution needs to be applied, Willis says. Memory of the trauma experience may become accessible only via the associated emotions. In these cases, whole family treatment is essential. In addition, simple techniques from breathing, proper diet and nutritional supplements can help regulate blood levels and go a long way toward overcoming these issues.

Trauma Treatment

If you or someone you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

You don’t need to live in the big city to know that drugs are a problem, but most of us thought third graders were still safe from temptation for at least a few more years. Not so according to a recent story from Pennsylvania where an eight-year-old boy headed to school with dozens of packets thought to contain heroin.

School officials say the kid wasn’t just “holding,” he was handing the packets out to fellow students in his third grade class. The incident happened in a small town near Pittsburgh, where investigators say they recovered approximately 60 folded packs they believe to contain heroin. As if that weren’t bad enough, 18 more open packets were found in the classroom garbage. No arrests have been made, but Allegheny County Children-Youth and Family service was contacted, and the school has promised to take “swift and appropriate disciplinary action in this case to ensure the continued safety of all children.”

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, a fifth grader reportedly brought a bottle of liquor to school and shared it with four other kids on the playground. The Tennessee boy and his friends were found out by a teacher who took the bottle away, but not before the kids did some sampling. The bottle’s label said it contained vodka, according to a report by Tennessee news outlet WSMV, but investigators from the White County Sheriff’s Department aren’t ruling out the possibility that the bottle contained “white liquor” or “moonshine” instead. If that were the case, charges could be brought since the substance is against the law. In addition to action by the Sheriff’s Department, the State Alcohol Beverage Commission and the Department of Children’s Services were also called. The parents will likely have to answer some questions and the kids were all given 20 days of in-school suspension and ordered to undergo counseling.

Kids and Illegal Substances

Kids have always been curious and these incidents certainly aren’t the first of their kind, but the response is a testament to our anti-drug culture and the renewed commitment teachers and law enforcement have to keep our kids safe. What used to warrant a trip to the principal’s office and a phone call home can now involve local, state or even federal agencies. That’s great for cracking down on dealers and keeping kids from experimenting in the first place, but punishment is only half of the equation. We still need to offer help for kids and their loved ones who are in need of treatment for addiction.

Addiction Help

If you or someone you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

Substance use, abuse and addiction are on the rise among teens, and our prevention efforts in the past don’t go much beyond telling kids how to “just say no.” Aside from a generic (if well-meaning) one-size-fits-all approach, nothing is done to address the specific needs of those with a predisposition to addiction. Add to that group the teens at an elevated risk due to environmental, genetic and other factors and the need for change is clear.

Identifying High Risk Teens

One cutting-edge approach is to identify youth who are at higher risk for addiction before they ever begin experimenting with drugs or alcohol. Addiction expert Ralph E. Tarter, Ph.D. of eCenter Research, believes it’s possible to do just that.

Tarter’s research into the neurobehavioral antecedents of addiction holds out the promise of one day being able to target at-risk youth long before they’ve begun using, potentially averting the devastation of addiction before it has a chance to take root, or at least catching it early enough to avoid the worst of its life-destroying effects, Behavioral Health Central recently reported.

Tarter, who is Director of the NIDA-funded Center for Education and Drug Abuse Research (CEDAR) and a Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, is currently researching the biobehavioral risk factors which underlie the risk for substance use disorders within a developmental perspective.

The study seeks to look at the two sources of risk – environmental factors and a biological predisposition to addiction – to find the differences in those at-risk. “Our challenge and task is to quantify it and put it into a meaningful perspective so that it is useful for clinicians in designing both prevention and treatment programs,” Tarter explains.

Early Signs of a Possible Addict

So far, the study seems to indicate that there are characteristics present in infancy and early childhood that may point to a risk for future addiction. One such characteristic is what Tarter calls “a temperamentally difficult baby,” adding, “We see this in children when they get a little older they tend to be a little more overactive, more restless. The behavior is less organized. They then tend to be more impulsive, making it very hard for parents to discipline them, and as a result, the children get onto a trajectory of getting into conflicts with parents, with other children, and with teachers beginning early in nursery school and in daycare setting; because the behavior is not well organized and regulated. That is one of the long-term effects of what the drugs may do when they start using them, that these drugs may create a pharmacologically-based regulation, which is one of the factors that is rewarding and therefore contributing to continued use.”

This is just one factor and research continues into the origin of those psychological characteristics, but Tarter is already seeing measurable results from his work.

“We’re identifying these mechanisms very, very early in life and in our own research center we’re able, for example, to measure them and scale these characteristics on a single measure, which allows us to predict with about 75 percent accuracy right now whether or not a 10-year-old child will in fact develop an addiction by the age of 22,” Tarter told Behavioral Health Central. “So we’re able to get some pretty long-term predictions by taking into account an understanding of the genetic and early environmental basis of these characteristics.”

Screening tools continue to be developed that may help professionals – and eventually parents and teachers – spot warning signs and eventually begin to prevent addiction before it even starts.

Addiction Treatment

If you or someone you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

Parents, educators and professionals are always looking for effective ways to keep kids from drinking. Unfortunately, a new study shows that anti-drinking ads which employ scare tactics or guilt may produce the opposite effect in young people, and can actually increase the likelihood of binge drinking, according to a report on BehavioralHealthCentral.com.

The questionnaire-based study had researchers interviewing 1,200 undergrads after viewing the negative ads. Oddly enough, researchers found that the students were more likely to report that they might engage in binge-drinking behaviors after viewing the ads than they had been before.

Why Teens Ignore Warnings

What’s the reason for this reverse impact? It could be that common teen malady of feeling invincible. Researchers theorize that ads showing negative consequences like people being violently ill after drinking or the consequences of an alcohol-related car accident, may trigger a defensive coping mechanism that makes those viewing the images feel like those same consequences only happen to other people and won’t ever happen to them.

Scare tactics have long been a favorite of adults hoping to curb unwanted behavior in teens and pre-teens. It was a particularly popular option in driver’s training courses, where bloody accident scenes were shown to teens to frighten them into driving safely. But it turns out that if pushed too far, teens (and all of us, for that matter) simply shut down, refusing to process or remember what they’ve been shown.

So will this impact future ad campaigns aimed at teens? Only time will tell if positivity will prevail. The study will be published in the April, 2010 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.

Addiction Treatment

If you or someone you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

In this case, bigger definitely isn’t better.

After a decade of consistent declines in teen drug abuse, a new national study released by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and MetLife Foundation shows a definite rise in the use of drugs that teens encounter. According to the 2009 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study sponsored by MetLife Foundation the number of teens in grades 9-12 that used alcohol in the past month has grown by 11 percent while ecstasy use shows a 67 percent increase and marijuana use rose 19 percent.

Drug Acceptance

Kids are also likely to see drug and alcohol use more acceptable than they were during the past decade. There are more pro-drug cues in pop culture at the same time that funding for prevention programs is being slashed, making it more important than ever for parents to be involved and talk to their kids about drug and alcohol use on a regular basis. The study shows that it’s not the current trend, though. Among parents of teens who have used, nearly half (47 percent) either waited to take action or took no action at all, putting those children at greater risk of continued use and negative consequences.

“We’re very troubled by this upswing that has implications not just for parents, who are the main focus of the Partnership’s efforts, but for the country as a whole,” said Partnership Chairman Patricia Russo. “The United States simply can’t afford to let millions of kids struggle through their academic and professional lives hindered by substance abuse. Parents and caregivers need to play a more active role in protecting their families, trust their instincts and take immediate action as soon as they sense a problem.”

Teen Drug Abuse

If you or someone you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance

Law enforcement in Northeast Pennsylvania is seeing the misuse of prescription drugs among juveniles as a growing problem, according to a report in the Scranton Times-Tribune.

Representatives from district attorneys’ offices in three neighboring counties spoke with about 100 educators at the Lackawanna County Center for Public Safety, as part of an ongoing discussion and call to action on gangs and gang-related activity. In Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, the district attorney’s office just started tracking prescription drug offenses this year, but officials can already tell it’s becoming more widespread, according to the Scranton Times-Tribune.

It’s not a problem specific to this region or to Pennsylvania, though. It’s happening across the country.

The easy access to prescription meds make it simple for kids to get a hold of painkillers like OxyContin or Vicodin, depressants from Valium to Xanax, and ADD and ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. Kids are selling their own medications or “borrowing” whatever they can find in their parents’ medicine cabinets.

Methods of Ingesting

In addition to the dangers of youth taking drugs that aren’t prescribed for them, the method of ingestion adds new problems since they frequently crush and then snort the drugs, destroying the product’s time-release function.

Law enforcement is encouraging parents to take the seemingly-drastic step of using a lockbox to keep prescription meds safe and out of the hands of teenagers and children.

Prescription Drug Addiction

If you or someone you love is battling an addiction, call La Paloma at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.