by Alison L Miller, MSN, PMH-BC, RN, FAIS I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 1986, six months after my baby daughter and I almost died during childbirth. But that isn't when it started. If there was a DSM qualifier for PTSD that included "stacked" traumas, that's what I would be diagnosed with. Instead, they tend to call it "Complex PTSD." or cPTSD. Whatever it's called, it sucks to deal with. Like so many, my first batch of traumas started in childhood. I

One. Objective. Only. Restraints are to be used only as an intervention that helps the patient regain behavioral control in order to maintain patient and staff safety. Period. Drop the mic. That's it. There is no other reason allowed for using restraints on a patient. And the moment behavioral control has been regained, the restraints must come off. The patient does NOT need to have regained control over their emotions. They may still be angry or sobbing. But if they

by Alison L Miller, MSN, PMH-BC, FAIS TEST TIDBIT TUESDAY Personality disorders tend to show up early in life (childhood) but are not diagnosed formally until after the age of 18, giving the child the chance to change their environment, and therefore their responses to that environment. But once an individual reaches 18, and there is a persistent--day in, day out, inflexible--pattern of behavior and thought that is considered unhealthy, dysfunctional, and/or aberrant, and the

FLASHCARD FRIDAY An astounding 14.5 million  Americans have been diagnosed with major depression in the past 12 months. And I'll bet all the money in my wallet that that number is low, mostly because so many people never get diagnosed at all. Oh, and that's just the adult  population. Count in the teenagers and that number zooms up to nearly  20 million.   The prevelance over people's entire lifetimes goes into the stratosphere--an astounding 105 million Americans . The chanc