Data from 2009 indicates that more than 20% of Americans experienced a loss of 25% of their income. This is the highest percentage since these data began to be collected and studied. Since 2009 the economy has been getting progressively worse and the unemployment rate has steadily increased, without any indication of this trend slowing down or turning around. Savings have been mostly wiped out for a large part of the middle class, and the poor are getting poorer. Based on this, we may assume the percentage of Americans who lost 25% or more of their income will continue to increase.

How is this going to impact people emotionally?

The first element that creates a lot of stress is that of surprise. Nobody had predicted the intensity and magnitude of this recession. Nobody had expected it would last so long and its recovery would be so slow (if there is recovery at all.)

Young and old Americans alike have no personal experience of living through a recession as severe as the current one. Therefore, they had no way of preparing for it and, most importantly, THEY DID NOT BELIEVE IT WAS POSSIBLE. Everybody knew, intellectually, that things couldn’t go on the way they were forever. But there is a huge difference between knowing things intellectually and actually experiencing them emotionally.

It’s like when we know someone dear to us will soon die. Intellectually we acknowledge this reality. We can even convince ourselves that we are preparing for this event, so when it happens we will be ready for it. But, in reality, when this person actually dies we realize we had no way of anticipating the emotional impact of this loss. We had no idea of how it would feel like FEELING it. So, we get blindsided by how powerful and out of control our emotions are, and how destabilizing.

Well, something similar is happening to us now, as we try to grapple with feelings of ambiguity, confusion, fear and helplessness due to the current economic uncertainties. We look around for support, directions, comfort and reassurance, but there is very little to be had.

Like children, we look around for surrogate parents to reassure and help us regulate our emotions These are the politicians, the government representatives and other people in power positions we thought would be able to look after our needs and protect us from these kinds of frightening situations. However, they seem to be unable or unwilling to provide us with what we need. Even when they reassure us, their voices sound tentative and their body language not reassuring, so we have a very hard time believing them.

We are like a huge dysfunctional family where the parents are asleep at the wheel and failing to provide safety for its members. The children – all of us – always assumed they would take good care of us: that they would come through for us if/when needed, so we placidly continued with our comfortable lives, expecting things to go on forever. Now the parents are like the emperor without clothes, who is showing his nakedness for all to see, even though he still thinks he is hiding it.  But we now know better, and because of it, we are scared and deeply hurt.

In the next blog post we will describe what can be done to improve this situation and feel less powerless.

Feel free to give us your views by clicking the “comments” button below.

Without getting into a political or moral discussion on the use of atomic bombs in times of war, I want to focus on some of the effects these actions provoked from people from all over the world.

Most of us have seen footage of the big white cloud spreading over the entire city of Hiroshima, seconds after the bomb was dropped. Most of us have seen daunting images of people dead in the streets, burnt to a crisp, or disfigured beyond belief. We also know of the many genetic and cellular mutations that brought about forms of cancer at levels never seen before for years after the bomb was dropped, and the birth defects that occurred for a long time.

The entire city was leveled, but if you go to Hiroshima today, you will see a modern city that does not have any reminder of this tragic past, with one exception. At the epicenter of the bomb, while everything else was destroyed, one building stood, and it is till there today. Now this building is the center of a memorial park dedicated to the victims of the atomic bomb. Here and there are statues and thousands and thousands of paper crane garlands, brought by school children in commemoration of a little girl who died of cancer a few years after the bomb. In Japan, paper cranes are thought to bring good health to sick people. When this girl was still alive, children made origami paper cranes and brought them to the park, wishing she would get healthy again. When she died, this tradition continued, the paper cranes being offered to whomever still suffered from the after effects of the bomb.

When I visited the park and the museum, two things surprised me: a profound silence, and people’s attitudes. People were shuffling around from one exhibit to the next without making any noise, or wandered under the trees outside in complete silence. They did not talk to one another. They were in a state of shock. I felt the same. The enormity of what I was seeing – pictures of children screaming terrified, with their skin falling off their little bodies; mothers holding their dead babies, terror in their eyes and confusion because they couldn’t understand what was happening, houses burning, entire areas reduced to rubble in a matter of few seconds – was such that my mind could not process it in any logical manner. I felt overwhelmed by intense emotions that prevented me from thinking about what was going on.  Like a traumatized person, I felt frozen.

The other thing that surprised me was the kindness in the eyes of people I met there, young and old alike, toward me. I expected them to look at me with reproaching eyes, with anger, even hatred, because I looked American, but I saw and felt none of that.  It was a though we were all together in this, Japanese, Americans and everybody else.

It felt to me as though the enormity of this event had for a moment blurred our ethnic differences. The tragedy of the destruction caused by the bomb somehow united us in grief and determination not to make it happen again. In the end, we were all human, and it was our humanity that united us.

The answer is YES. Vacations have value both for our bodies and our minds.

When we go on vacation, we are more likely to relax, we sleep longer and better, take it easy, slow down and take time to enjoy things around us and activities we typically don’t have time for in our busy lives.

But what about our minds? How are vacations good for the mind? In a few words, they give our minds a much needed break.

Our brains work all the time. They never shut down, even when we are sleeping or lying on a lounge chair doing nothing. We may think about what’s going on in the present; we may recall events that happened to us in the past and can bring back the events and the feelings associated to them; we hear fragments of conversation from people around us and these may trigger associations that can take us to all kinds of places in time and space.

Even when we sleep, our brain continues to work. It processes the day events, making sense of them and arranging them in a system that is logical and organized. It connects these events to past ones, thus creating continuity and imbuing them with personal meanings.

Of course, our brains continue to work even while we are on vacation. So, you may ask, what’s the difference?

If we succeed in letting go of our daily lives and stay focused on the present, on vacation we get engaged in new activities and interests that provide our brain with a rest from the daily grind. It is, in fact, when we are able to shift from one topic to another that we allow our mind to rest. Working in the garden, for instance, can be more hard work than sitting in an office all day long. However, because we can relax while planting, weeding, re-potting or whatever else we do in the garden, our brain has the opportunity to shift gears, so to speak, and use different synapses to think about gardening. The same is true when we play golf, or relax under an umbrella by the pool, hike or read a book. In short, it is not the place or the activity, but the ability to shift our focus from daily activities to something different that gives our brains a well deserved rest. In order for a vacation to be truly rejuvenating and resting for our mind as well as our body, we need to be in the same place mentally and physically.

This means that we could be on the most wonderful beach, or visiting the most amazing places on earth, but we may as well be in the office, if our mind cannot let go of it.

So, please leave your Blackberry and your computer at home and disconnect from anything that keeps you chained to your daily concerns and preoccupations. By going in and out of two places –where you physically are and where your mind is – you will enjoy neither. If you stay in the moment, on the other hand, you will give yourself an opportunity to truly take advantage of your vacation and come back relaxed and ready to get back to your daily life.

And, have a wonderful time!

When we are in pain, mornings can be the most difficult parts of our day, as they force us to think about the day ahead, and all the things we need to do but don’t want or have the energy to face. So, the daily activities we look forward to when we are well, now become reminders of what causes us pain. We feel we have no energy to take a shower and get ready for the day, for instance. We’d rather pull the blanket over our heads and go back to sleep, so we don’t have to face a reality and feel overwhelming emotions out of our control.

Even at these painful times, however, daily routines are very helpful, because they gradually move us out of this paralyzed state. When we force ourselves to get up even if we want to stay in bed, in fact, or when we make ourselves take a shower and get dressed, we begin to feel a little less helpless and powerless.

We shouldn’t give in to sadness and pain because these feelings will paralyze us more and more if we don’t fight them. So, we need to force ourselves to go through daily routines as though each day was a normal day and we felt all right. Daily routines, even in times of sadness and pain, keep us in touch with the reality around us. They maintain a sense of consistency and continuity even when we are not well. And it is by facing reality, day in and day out, that eventually we will lift the veil of apathy, disinterest, pain and sadness that can keep us paralyzed.

There are situations where, for one reason or another, we have to let go of our daily routines. Their loss – due to illness, divorce, relocation or getting old, for instance – creates anxiety and discomfort, as though without them we temporarily lost our bearings. Older people who move into retirement homes, for instance, typically have difficulties adapting to a life where daily routines are so different and foreign to them. Older people, as they learn to rely less and less on their memory, sight and hearing because they are not as sharp as they used to be, and who battle mental confusion, rely more on their outside environment to compensate for these internal losses. So, relocation needs to be handled with sensitivity and awareness that these changes can be quite difficult.

When older people are moved from a familiar environment to a strange one, in fact, at first they feel lost. They may be unable to function at their usual level and they may appear to be more confused. To re-establish daily routines for them and make sure they are helped at the beginning, can make the relocation much easier. As they gradually get used to their new environment and re-establish daily routines, they often are able to regain their previous level of functioning.

These challenges, to a bigger or lesser extent, affect anyone who moves from a familiar place to an unfamiliar one, not only older people. It is important, therefore, to make sure that, wherever we are, we set routines in place as soon as possible in order to preserve a feeling of continuity and normalcy so fundamental for our wellbeing.

Feel free to offer your views on this topic by clicking the comments button below.

Now I will address the loss of a job and the similarities and differences between job loss in the current recession versus job loss during other difficult economic times in recent history.

Possibly the most striking difference is that currently people are not only losing their specific job, but often they lose the opportunity to find a job again in their area of expertise. We have seen whole industries disappear, with no other prospects of employment for the people who used to work in them.

As I live in Arizona, which is one the areas most affected by this recession and one of the slowest to recover from it, I am quite familiar with the stresses people in real estate and related businesses are suffering. Real estate was an area that, in the past, had been growing at an incredible speed in this State. People had moved here from other states to seize the opportunities that seemed endless. Individuals and businesses were accumulating a lot of wealth and thought this trend would go on forever. Now a lot of these people are not only out of a job, but they have lost most if not all their investments and there are no jobs to be had in this field.

Understanding what is happening to them provides a unique perspective not only on what happens when a person loses his or her job, but also what follows the loss of the job: how people recover, or not, and how they are affected by these negative changes, as they continue to affect their lives.

An array of feelings is experienced following a job loss, at times in close succession, repeatedly, at times concurrently. This is not unlike the feelings created by a death or a chronic terminal illness. Feelings range from panic, deep sadness, confusion, guilt, wrath, anger, frustration, self doubt, and back to panic, rage, sadness, and on and on. This process can take months, even longer if the situation does not improve. With some individuals it may never end, particularly if they are forced to take jobs with much less prestige, recognition, pay and responsibilities, or jobs that are outside their areas of knowledge and experience.

Loss of Identity, Loss of Purpose, Loss of Self-Worth, Loss of Power and often Loss of Social Network and Community are all psychological losses that deeply affect people who lose their jobs.

If you have experienced a job loss, we invite you to tell us how it affected you and what did or did not help you to get through these difficult times. Click the comment button below.

Families are the most typical places people go to in order to borrow money, yet family relationships are also the most sensitive to money matters. Adult children may see borrowing money as embarrassing and humiliating, after they finally achieved independence from their parents. Now the boundaries they set up with their families in the past – respect my privacy; don’t pry; don’t push; don’t preach – no longer hold. Lenders may ask questions before deciding whether or not to help the person in need. Borrowers feel forced to disclose where their money goes, what they buy regularly, what they could do without… The balance of mutual respect, privacy and distance that previously existed between them is now being shaken to its core. Now dad, for instance, or an older sibling or a close friend may ask them very specific and detailed information about how they got to this place or why they have not found a job yet. They may feel entitled to give them unrequested advice about what they should do to improve their finances, where they should live, and so on. In other words, they are treated like children who still need to be guided and supervised.

At the other end, the person or persons who lend the money may also feel awkward.  They may want to help, but find hard to discuss borrowing money with someone with whom they had a different kind of relationship. They wonder whether their relationship will remain the same, or if money will change it in some basic way.

Additionally, at times when a person, say a relative, asks for money, this situation can create tension with other members of the family. For instance, in a marriage the husband may want to help his younger brother who lost his job and is getting evicted if he does not find some money real soon. The wife, however, may feel quite differently. Helping her brother-in-law may tie up some money that had been ear- marked for a family vacation, for a new washing machine, or something special for the kids.

Is there a healthy way of dealing with these situations?

The most important thing to do is to keep clear arrangements, as much as possible. When you borrow money, make sure you offer a time table within which you will repay your debt. Be frank: think about your situation and give yourself a realistic deadline for repayment. Don’t make this deadline too tight, because you may not be able to achieve your goal. But even if you don’t, it is often better to re-negotiate the deal than to leave arrangements about repayment open ended. Write a contract if you can. Offer to pay interests. Make sure to say that you will work hard at preventing this transaction from affecting the relationship. Tell the lender that your relationship with them is very valuable to you and you will work your hardest to treat borrowing as a business deal, with expectations and obligations. Do not avoid this person after you get the money. Embarrassment and shame may push you to hide. However, if you avoid the other person, they may wonder about your intentions. Don’t wait for them to ask you questions. Whenever there is an opportunity, make some comments about what you are doing to improve your financial situation. You don’t have to report your progress to them blow by blow, but you may want to share as much as you are comfortable, so they are kept in the loop by you. All of this means that you now need to see borrowing money as part of your relationship with them, a part that you acknowledge, take seriously and handle responsively.

Even before this recession occurred, the percentage of adult children moving back home was on the increase in this country. A New York Times survey indicates that between 2000 and 2008 the number increased by 32% nationwide (New York Times, 3/22/10.) As of 2008, 20% of adult children were back home with their parents, or had never left. These figures are likely to continue to increase, as young people cannot find employment, are saddled with huge student loans they cannot repay, or are going back to school to increase their employment opportunities in the future.

What are some of the implications of this trend?

It is part of the American culture to be independent, to seek one’s fortune and move out of one’s parents’ home to go to college, or to find a job, at times very far away from the parents’ home. This is very different than what happens in a lot of other countries, particularly more traditional ones, where adult children continue to live at home. In Italy, for instance, most adult children, male and female, continue to live at home well into adulthood. There seems to be little social stigma in these familiar arrangements, which are seen as indications of strong family ties and sound cultural traditions rather than failure on the part of adult children to succeed independently.

In this country, however, there often is a sense of discomfort, even shame, in an adult person admitting he or she is still living at home.  Some of them complain it is difficult to date, as it is embarrassing to tell they don’t have a place of their own. So their romantic life can be quite affected by these arrangements. It is also difficult to feel like an adult when your parents are asking you at what time you will be home. Some of them, before they had to return home, may have had some time on their own. For them, being back home may feel like they are regressing and being treated as children again. This can have serious implications for their self esteem and self image.

With some adult children, however, living at home with their parents is not a strenuous experience. They are glad they can spend more time with family and don’t have to worry about making ends meet. There is some comfort that comes from being with someone who loves them. But these people seem to be a minority.

One way or the other, there are some boundaries that need to be established for these arrangements to work for everybody involved. Both parents and adult children need to sit down and talk about each other’s needs and discuss how they can be sensitive to them. Parents need to remind themselves their children ARE adults, even if they live with them at the present time. This means they need to give them the space they need, and respect their abilities to make decisions for themselves. Adult children, in turn, need to respect parents’ lives as being different now that when they were little. Parents need space to pursue their own interests and activities, and may not want to be thrown back into the full time parenting. With regular conversations about how to make these arrangements work for everybody, conflicts and strains can be managed, and all people involved can actually enjoy this opportunity to reconnect and get to know each other as ADULTS.

Give us your thoughts below by clicking comments.

Of course a lot of sectors have been and still are affected by this downturn. Lots of people lost their jobs, which means they lost their medical insurance coverage as well. Lots lost their homes. Lots still are currently on the brink of losing everything they have worked for.

While it is no mystery that all these losses have affected people in deep psychological ways, very little has been written on this compared to the volumes that have been written in other areas affected by the current recession. However, this is an extremely important area that needs to be addressed, because the psychological impacts of stress tend often to be longer lasting and more insidious than the economic ones, as they affect people at the very core of who they are. Self-value, self-confidence, sense of security and sense of identity, in fact, are deeply shaken and at times people never fully recover from these impacts.

In addition to the people whose psychological health has been deeply affected by the economic downturn, there are also people who were already suffering from mental illness and who struggled to function and be productive in their lives. For all these people resources have been cut to the point where a lot of them currently have no or very limited access to treatment. “Tens of millions of dollars in state budget cuts since fiscal 2009 mean there is less money to pay for patients’ hospitalizations, psychiatric and counseling sessions and medications,” reported the Arizona Republic (AZ Republic, 3/19/10.)

One sign of this dismal situation is the increasing number of people who go to emergency rooms for serious mental illness or suicidal problems. Again, the Arizona Republic reports that at Maricopa County Medical Center, for instance, the number of patients who go to their emergency room for psychiatric problems has grown from “fewer than 10 per week to between 20 and 25 per week.”

Too often when we talk about economic issues, we forget to look at the enormous psychological impact that an unstable situation has on the human mind. For those who suffer from severe mental illness, no access to treatment and medication can mean losing whatever relief they used to get from a system that, though inadequate, was nonetheless available to them.  Reports indicate that currently the system fails more than 80% of people who need their services. One of the results of this situation is that Arizona ranks number one in the country for the number of suicides. This is a terrible catastrophe that affects not only people suffering from mental illness, but their families and those who depend on them as well, and should affect all of us because it erodes the foundations of a democratic society based on the collective care for its citizens, particularly the ones who are ill and in need of help.

Feeling blue and suffering from clinical depression are two very different things.

Clinical depression is a condition that affects our moods (we feel down most of the time; we have a bleak outlook of our future, we are not excited about anything, even things we used to enjoy) our thoughts  (we tend to ruminate on the same, negative things, we cannot concentrate, we have difficulties making decisions) our behaviors (we find it difficult to be with people, we are not interested in anything) and our body (we may eat too much or too little; sleep too much or too little; have no energy, no libido, we feel tired most of the time even though we don’t do anything to explain it.)

Mental health professionals differentiate between various forms of clinical depression: Major Depression, Low grade, chronic depression, or Dysthymia, Bipolar Disorder and Adjustment Disorder with Depression. Each of them may be have specific treatments and may have different causes: situational, genetic, histories of trauma, and medical problems.  

According to figures from the National Institute of Mental Health, about 20.9 million people in this country suffer from one form or another of clinical depression. This means 9.5% of all Americans age 18 or older suffer from depression! This is a staggering figure, and seems to be increasing. Major depressive disorder is the major leading cause of disability for ages 15-44, striking people in their most productive years. Of course, depression does not affect only people’s ability to work, but also their social interactions and family lives, disrupting not only those who are depressed, but also people around them. Additionally, depressed people may have other problems as well, such as substance abuse, anxiety, and various medical conditions which may have been the cause or caused by the depression, or are co-occurring with it. Women are twice as vulnerable to depression as men.

According to www.psychologyinfo.com, nearly two-thirds of depressed people do not get proper treatment. There are several reasons why this is so, but I will mention only two here:

1. Symptoms of depression do not develop overnight, but creep up gradually and at first unnoticeably, so people often do not realize they are depressed until they are in a lot of pain and unable to function as they previously did. And even then they may think there is something wrong with them physically, or blame their job, family situation, or other reasons for their symptoms.

2. There is still social stigma about depression. Some people, particularly men, may equate depression with weakness and failure, so they may resist acknowledging their symptoms for what they are and seek help.

What can be done?

The two most used forms of treatment are:

Psychotherapy. Providing support can reduce social and emotional isolation, reduce fears and hopelessness and helplessness and ease the pain. Also it helps reduce pessimistic thoughts and it facilitates the development of positive life goals. Furthermore, it helps assess which areas in a person’s life may be contributing to the maintenance of negative feelings and stress and change them. 70-80% of people in therapy report improvement in 20-30 sessions.

Medication. There are many medications on the market today. You may want to consult with your family doctor or see a psychiatrist to discuss which one may be appropriate to alleviate your symptoms.

There are also things you can do to help yourself: do not see depression as a reflection of who you are. There should be no shame about suffering from depression. Depression affects people of all ages, educational and socio-economic backgrounds. Do not blame yourself. Examine what is going on in your life and make appropriate changes. Exercise, even if you don’t feel like it. Be with other people, even if you want to be left alone. And give it time, as recovery from depression does not happen overnight, but over time. Focus on what makes you feel better and stick to it.

Above all, remember that there is light at the end of the tunnel, even if you don’t see it when you are in the tunnel.

First, let’s talk about what stress is. There is no single definition of stress, as it is not a definable entity that can be measured and described.  So, when we talk about stress, what are we talking about?

Stress is any internal or external demand placed on us. We can stress ourselves by pushing to get something done in a tight time frame, or we can get stressed if our boss overloads us with tasks that we see as excessive and disproportionate for our abilities. Stress can be positive, like when we set appropriate time frames to achieve something. This spurs us to work more efficiently and to maintain motivation and optimal performance. However, when we feel what is required of us well exceeds our abilities to do it, we become stressed. Our performance is affected and this, in turn, increases our stress. If we don’t find a way of interrupting this process, it will get worse and turn into chronic stress.

Holidays are times of multiple demands and activities. We are pushed and pulled in different directions at the same time, and we have a tough time keeping everything under control and organized. They are therefore a perfect time to apply our strategies for stress management.

Assess the situation. Our perception of stress is more important than the type of stress we are facing. This is why what may be stressful for a person may be felt to be quite manageable by another. It is our assessment of the level of stress that determines how we are going to respond to it. And this is where we can make changes to improve our stress response, so that stress, rather than being paralyzing, becomes a motivating force for us.

Organize your resources. Take a moment to determine, on a scale of 1 to 10, where your stress level is at. Because you know yourself, you can thus determine whether this stress level is still manageable for you, or if you need to let go of something to make the load more manageable. You know when you can perform at your best, and when it becomes more difficult to do so because of the many stressors you are trying to juggle.

Getting control over your situation is the best way to combat stress. When we are in control, we don’t feel stressed out, and we can perform at our best. Think about driving, for instance. Typically, the person who is at the driving wheel is not scared of performing this task. It is the person in the passenger seat that is often more scared. Fear causes anxiety, and anxiety leads to stress. This is so because the driver is in control; the passenger is not. There seems an inverse correlation between being in control and feeling stressed. The more in control, the less stressed we feel.

Prioritizing is part of taking control: of all the things that are currently pressing on you, which ones do you consider the most important? Can you organize them on a scale, from the most important and urgent to the least?  Write down this list. This can help you get a global view of what you need to do, so you can CHOOSE what you will do first.

Take breaks. Physical exercise is a very good stress reliever. It allows your body to let go of the tension you carry in your muscles. It allows your mind to shift gears from pushing yourself beyond your limits to being more mindful of what you need to maintain health and wellbeing. Sit down with a cup of tea and a magazine, or you close your eyes and meditate, or lay down and rest your body, allowing the bed to “support” your weight, feeling you sink into it. These are all relaxing ways that give yourself the message that your emotional and physical health are a priority.

All these techniques allow you to shift from stress response to relaxation response. They allow the level of stress hormone cortisol to get lower and increase your abilities to manage what needs to be done and enjoy the process.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!