Written By Katherine SwartsRead Time 7 Minutes The sandwich generation is defined as a subset of family caregivers who are taking care of both an adult loved one and a child. Even if your children are self-reliant for their age and your…
Category: Health & Wellness (page 6)
Enjoying the Holidays When Someone Has Seasonal Affective Disorder
Many people believe that suicide rates soar in December, when nights are longest, and when “joy of the season” only seems to mock the unhappiness of major life challenges. But nonetheless, the popular belief is wrong: in reality, the greatest…
Pets Are Good for You
Around half a million people in the U.S. keep service dogs trained to help with physical or emotional disabilities. Some 200,000 people have registered emotional support animals that provide a calming presence to help manage mental illness. And often, the…
Everyday Tips for Managing Epilepsy
A salute to November as National Epilepsy Awareness Month. There’s more to epilepsy than the infamous grand mal seizure. In fact, for many people with epilepsy, such a “big bad” seizure is a one-time event or never occurs at all.…
Retired Service Dogs
For the disability-affected person who seeks companionship along with practical assistance, the service dog is far superior to any inanimate tool. But though it’s a hard fact to face with any companion animal, a service dog is also likely to…
Living with a Dual Diagnosis: When Mental Disorder Meets Substance Use Disorder
Mental and emotional disorders present challenges on two fronts: dealing with the disorder itself, and dealing with stigma attached to the disorder. Public understanding has come a long way in recent decades, but it’s still easy to find people who…
Hearing Loss: The Most Isolating Disability
“The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex … than those of blindness. Deafness … means the loss of the most vital stimulus—the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in [human] intellectual…
Staying Healthy with a Disability
Do “disability” and “healthy” sound mutually exclusive? They shouldn’t be. An impairment to one physical or mental function doesn’t render the whole body useless: if anything, other functions become more effective as they’re exercised to compensate. Still, if the person…
The World of Forest Bathing
The Japanese term is shinrin-yoku, which translates to “forest immersion” or “forest bathing.” In English, it’s often called “forest therapy” or “nature therapy,” but “forest bathing” is popular enough to have put an International Forest Bathing Day on the calendar…
Polypharmacy: Too Much of a (Usually) Good Thing
(This article is partly adapted from “Polypharmacy: What Is It and Are You at Risk?,” a workshop presented by Jay Gupta at the Houston 2022 Abilities Expo.) Polypharmacy: the simultaneous use of multiple drugs by a single patient, for one…