Dealing with depression
Helping families "Out of the Darkened Room"
Many victims of depression view their illness with a paralyzing sense of shame, and often retreat into silence-a tactic that adds to their isolation and despair. In Out of the Darkened Room: Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family When a Parent Is Depressed, William Beardslee, MD, Children's psychiatrist-in-chief, stresses the importance of honest communication within families burdened by parental depression.
Beardlee's message stems from a two-decade study that traced the lives of 275 children, noting the characteristics that enabled some of them to survive and even thrive despite great difficulty. Based on those findings, the team implemented a prevention program for families in crisis-strategies Beardslee highlights in this book.
Those strategies emphasize that "families need to believe that a past was shared, that a present is being shared, and that a future can be shared," Beardslee writes. "Depression erodes that sense of continuity... [and] learning to talk together and make sense of the illness together, reknitting the sense of continuity, emerged as the heart of our approach to preventing depression in children."
A Map of the Child
A Children's fellow takes readers on a tour
In A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body, Darshak Sanghavi, MD, a fellow in pediatric cardiology at Children's, reflects on the astonishing development of children, who begin as single cells and rapidly develop into complex beings, complete with full sets of organs. But how does this happen, and what can be done when something goes wrong? The book takes readers on a dramatic tour of medical discovery through the eight vital organs of a child, beginning with the lungs and proceeding to the heart, blood, bones, skin, brain, gonads and gut.
Through patient narratives that touch on medicine, psychology, religion, culture and politics, Sanghavi involves readers in his own learning process, and illuminates many controversial topics in pediatrics: circumcision, vaccination for chicken pox, child abuse, alternative medicine, and more. Sanghavi also describes the struggle to come to terms with illness in his own family, a theme that echoes throughout the book.
