How did I get home last night? My bizarre, panicked life as a blackout drinker

I fell down staircases. I woke up in strange homes. When you love booze like I did, it's amazing what you'll ignore

SARAH HEPOLA

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A photo of the author in college

The following is adapted and excerpted from "Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget," coming out June 23 (Grand Central).

I met my friend Allison at a Mexican restaurant. We hadn’t seen each other in years. It had been so long that, as I scanned the menu and failed to listen to the waiter recite the evening’s specials, I couldn’t stop my mind from tunneling back through time in an effort to pinpoint when we last hung out. This is a form of bragging for me. I pride myself on remembering more than anyone else.

“I know,” I said. “Your 36th birthday party,” and I smacked the table like it was a buzzer.

“You’re right!” she said.

That party was such a blast. Three years later, I can still remember so much about it: How her cozy Park Slope apartment was strung up with Christmas lights. How I planned to stop by for a quick drink, maybe three, before heading to another party across town. How I charmed her chic 20-something colleagues from the online fashion magazine with my big ideas about female comedians and sex.

But of all the details I can summon, one I cannot is how I got home that night. Trying to remember the end of that evening now is like watching a movie with a reel of film missing. I’m talking to this girl on the back porch, I’m laughing with this girl on the back porch, and then … the screen goes blank. CUT TO: Me, in my Williamsburg loft at 6 a.m., the white curtains billowing in the breeze.

I’d had blackouts since the first time I got drunk. If you’ve never had a blackout, then you might not understand the singular horror of waking up to discover that time is missing. People often confuse blackout with passing out, but the experiences are quite different. A person who is passed out is unconscious. A person in a blackout is very much awake: Walking, talking, singing bad karaoke. You keep going, even as your long-term memory shuts down. Sometimes my blackouts were only a few minutes, a temporary outage, but a few lasted hours, and the first 10 seconds of a hungover Sunday morning were a checklist of panic: Did I remember how I got home? Was anyone lying beside me? Did I have any cuts or bruises? I woke to strange data sets. Orange juice on the counter, refrigerator door flapping open. My vibrator tossed on the living room couch. Once I woke up with a half-eaten corn dog in my hand and a smear of mustard across my face. But I was starving, so I ate it.

Allison leaned in at the table. “Oh my God, do you remember that night?” she asked, and I braced myself. Anyone with a drinking history learns to hate those words. The wrecking ball is about to arrive.

“Actually, I don’t,” I said.

“You fell down my staircase.”

I covered my face with my hands and peeked at Allison through the slats of my fingers. “Yeah, I used to do that.“

“My stairs were marble,” she said. “It was terrifying. Honestly, I’d never seen anything like it. You don’t remember this at all?”

No, but I was familiar with the habit. By my mid-30s, I had drunkenly tumbled down rickety outdoor wooden steps and glamorous winding staircases. I don’t know what’s crazier: That I drank as long as I did, or that I kept wearing heels. Once, I tripped down the narrow metal staircase of a Turkish restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and wound up in St. Vincent’s hospital with a concussion and the world’s most excruciating hangover. But what was most remarkable about these extravagant nosedives was how painless and without consequence they often were. I’d get up, dust myself off, and grab another drink. OK. What’s next?

“I can’t even remember how I got home that night,” I told Allison.

“Oh I remember,” she said. “We put you in a cab.”

Thank God for cabbies. Other people can give teary testimonials to the cops and the fire department, but as far as I’m concerned, cabbies are the superheroes of New York City. They have ferried me safely home when I couldn’t see straight — I mean, when I literally held one hand over an eye to keep from spinning. They have driven me up and down the same few blocks while I tried to figure out which of the blurry row houses was my blurry row house.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Allison, hands still shielding my face, as though I could somehow hold in the embarrassment.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I felt bad putting you in that cab. I wanted you to stay the night at my place.”

“But I refused, I’m sure.”

“You wouldn’t hear of it.”

In addition to being a sot, I was stubborn to boot. I sometimes bristled when people tried to take care of me, as though they were telling me I threw like a girl. I’d stagger off into the night: I’ll show you. Whenever I woke up on a friend’s couch, it was a sign that something had gone wrong. Not only had I been too drunk to remember; I’d been too drunk to escape.

When the blackouts first started happening, they could derail me for days. In college, I woke up from one blackout feeling like a kidnapping victim emerging from the trunk of a car: How did I get here? Who did this to me? In my 20s, I’d spend hours writhing in bed trying to reconstruct the night, imagining with a full-body cringe what boozy gimmick I’d pulled from my bag of tricks: Did I flash a stranger? Throw beer in people’s faces? Force everyone to watch me perform songs from “Jesus Christ Superstar”? But by the age of 33, when I went to Allison’s party, I had grown weary of these convulsions of anxiety. I was the kind of person who could spend an hour flinching over a misplaced comma in a story; I didn’t need to take a deep dive into what might or might not have occurred in the course of two lost hours.

So what I can remember about waking up after Allison’s party is that I simply did not remember. If I had any bruises or scrapes from my fall, they did not throb or otherwise snag my attention, a detail that is sad in its own quiet, neglectful way. I woke up, alone, in my own bed. My earrings had been removed and placed in the bathroom drawer. As far as I could see, nothing was amiss.

I wondered that morning if I should text Allison. “Had a great time last night! The part I can remember was amazing!” Or maybe I should call and apologize. But apologize for what, exactly? I needed my own fill-in-the-blank letter of apology:

“Dear so-and-so. I’m terribly sorry that I _________ last night. You must have felt very _________ when I _________. I drank too much _________ that night, and I was not in my right mind.”

In the end, I sacked out on my futon, watched a marathon of reality TV and ordered pad thai. It was years till Allison and I saw each other again.

I avoided a great deal in those days. I avoided credit card bills that piled up on the counter. I avoided full-length mirrors. I avoided doctors, since I did not have insurance. I avoided going to the same bodegas and wine stores too often, keeping several in my regular rotation lest the cashiers get any ideas about me. And when I behaved badly in the company of a drinking companion, I simply avoided her, too. This was incredibly easy to do in a city where “the G train” served as a suitable excuse for failing to visit close friends.

I should have just emailed Allison. It wouldn’t have been hard. But there was something so debasing about having to ask another person: What did I do? Can you help me remember?

Instead, I mentioned my evening to a friend who lived down the street. “I’m sure you were fine,” she said, and gave me a comforting rub on the back. The white lies women tell each other: You look great in that dress. No one will notice that thing on your head. I’m sure you were fine.

Surely, I was fine. I was fine, sure. She and I cracked a bottle of red wine in her apartment, and it was like my insides shifted back into place. OK. What’s next?

“I was worried about you that night,” Allison told me at the restaurant.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was the fifth time I’d said it. I wish the vocabulary here were more varied. I’m sorry. I apologize. I wish I hadn’t done that. Part of the reason I stopped calling friends the morning after was that I grew tired of hearing the same dumb words crawl out of my mouth. I got tired of hearing the same words from them, too: I’m worried about you. You need to keep it together. And then part of the reason I stopped calling was that I didn’t want to know what happened. I couldn’t hear it anymore. Every problem drinker struggles with denial, but blackout drinkers have a particular burden. If you don’t remember a thing — did it really happen? The blackouts were a terror, but the blackouts were a kind of protection too, like someone pulling the shade down in front of my drunken behavior and telling me I didn’t really need to know.

If I reflect on my drinking years now, what I remember first is how amazing they were. The promise of a cold beer in my tired hands, the perfect pop of a cork coaxed from the bottle at 6 p.m. Drinking rescued me from the dull ache of ordinary life — a life spent waiting for life to begin — and I can’t imagine my college years, the wandering of my 20s, the striving of my early 30s without it. Alcohol was the glue that bound everything together: my friendships with women, my romances with men. Even my career in media seemed to improve with a glass of wine in my hand. Sometimes I think I won’t ever feel lighter, or more powerful, than when I was drinking.

“You sure drink fast,” a guy would say, watching me down a beer, and I would lick the foam from my lips. Damn straight.

But if I dig deeper, it’s not long before I remember the blackouts. How disorienting and spooky they were. I could not shake the fear of what could have happened but didn’t. What did happen — and couldn’t be fixed.

I tried so many tricks to avoid them. I stopped drinking bourbon. I drank a glass of water between cocktails. I cut out red wine before dinner, and then red wine after dinner. I moved to a new city. I got a new job. I went on antidepressants. I pledged myself to the gods of yoga and Vitamin Water. But here is the truth that I could not outrun: When I drank, I kept drinking. And if I drank enough — and God knows, I usually did — I would black out. It wasn’t an accident; it was an inevitability.

It’s been five years since I quit, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it sometimes. But for all the crashing good times that drinking gave me, it brought me so much shame. So much horror. So much regret. So many conversations like that evening with Allison, four years ago, when my dark past landed in my lap like a tossed grenade. The blackouts are what leveled me, and they haunt me still. The nights I can’t remember are the nights I can never forget.


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Pretty Little Liars

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The “Pretty Little Liars” Guide to Warner Bros. Studio

Feb 25th, 2015 | By Lindsay | Category: TV Locations

Read article HERE

Pretty Little Liars is set in the fictional town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania.
The pilot episode was shot in Vancouver, but once the series got picked up, production moved to L.A.
Though the show has made use of pretty much every square inch of the Warner Bros. backlot, I will only be covering the main locations that have appeared onscreen during the first two and a half seasons, as that is the point I am up to in the series.
An aerial view of Warner Bros. Studio with coordinating numbers denoting each PLL locale is pictured below.

1. The Marin House – Used repeatedly throughout the series, the house where Hannah Marin (Ashley Benson) lives is a large Colonial-style estate located at the southern end of Warner Village. It is denoted as building 187 on the Warner Bros. Studio map. Only the exterior is used on the series. As is the case with all of the Liar’s residences, the interior of Hannah’s house is a set located inside of a soundstage. In real life, the inside of the structure serves as a production office.

2. The Fields House – The residence where Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell) lives also pops up regularly on Pretty Little Liars. It is the northernmost house located on Midwest Street. The same home was also used as Ross (David Schwimmer) and Monica Geller’s (Courteney Cox) parents’ house on Friends. It is a practical set, meaning both the interior and exterior can be utilized for filming. While the inside was used on Friends (Season 2′s “The One with the Prom Video”), it does not appear on PLL.

3. The DiLaurentis House – This abode has had quite a few different residents throughout the series. Formerly occupied by Alison DiLaurentis (Sasha Pieterse) and then Maya St. Germain (Bianca Lawson), it is currently where Jason DiLaurentis (major cutie Drew Van Acker) lives. The structure is actually just a façade located on the shores of the Jungle and, as you can see in the photograph below, not even a full one at that. Yes, it is missing a roof, which is actually apparent sometimes onscreen.

4. The Hastings House – The façade that serves as the stately home where Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario, daughter of NCIS creator Donald P. Bellisario) lives is actually the rear side of the residence located next door to Emily’s house on Midwest Street. The same façade was used as Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory Gilmore’s (Alexis Bledel) house on Gilmore Girls.

5. Spencer’s Barn – The barn that Spencer painstakingly redecorated and that her sister, Melissa (Torrey DeVitto), then promptly moved into is located directly across from the Hastings residence, in what is actually the front yard of the property.

6. The Hastings Gate – The large gated entrance to Spencer’s estate is not a permanent façade – it is a piece that is set up in the Jungle, across from the DiLaurentis house, when needed. Because it is only put into place during an actual shoot, you will not catch a glimpse of it while on the Warner Bros. VIP Studio Tour. A photograph of the Jungle in its normal state, without Spencer’s gate, is pictured below.

7. Toby and Jenna’s House – The house where step-siblings Toby Cavanaugh (Keegan Allen) and Jenna Marshall (Tammin Sursok) live is located on Midwest Street, two doors down from Emily’s house.

8. Rosewood High School – The Liar’s high school is located on Midwest Street, near where it intersects with French Street. The structure appears regularly on the series, but, again, only the exterior is utilized. The hallways and classrooms are sets located inside of a soundstage.

9. Rosewood City Hall – City Hall is located adjacent to Rosewood High School.

10. Apple Rose Grille – The restaurant where the girls regularly hang out is located on the corner of Midwest Street and French Street. The same spot masked as Luke’s Diner on Gilmore Girls.

11. Rosewood’s Local Church – The Midwest Street church, located across the road from Emily’s house, has appeared countless times on the series. It was where Ian Thomas (Ryan Merriman) tried to kill Spencer in Season 1’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” where Ian’s funeral was held in Season 2’s “The Devil You Know,” and where Hannah tried to sabotage her dad’s wedding in Season 2’s “Over My Dead Body,” just to name a few of its appearances.

12. Anne Sullivan’s Office – Throughout Season 2, the Liars regularly visited therapist Anne Sullivan (Annabeth Gish) at her office, which was situated on Midwest Street across from the northern side of the church

13. Ezra Fitz’s Apartment Building – The exterior of the apartment building where Ezra Fitz (Ian Harding) lives is located in between French Street and Embassy Courtyard, across from New York Park. The edifice was featured in Season 1’s “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Lie, Lie Again . . .” and is denoted as Building 60 on the studio map.

14. Philadelphia City Museum – The Warner Bros. Courthouse masked as the Philadelphia City Museum, the site of Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale) and Ezra’s first real date, in “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Lie, Lie Again . . .” The Courthouse, which was featured regularly on the 1966 Batman television series, is located at the western end of Embassy Courtyard and is denoted as Building 61 on the studio map.

15. Noel Kahn’s Cabin/Lost Woods Resort – In the Season 1 episode of Pretty Little Liars titled “To Kill a Mocking Girl,” the Liars attend a party thrown at a cabin belonging to Noel Kahn’s (Brant Daugherty) parents. The building used in the episode is located in the Jungle and is known as the Practical House.

Teenagers are swapping alcohol and drugs for self-harm and eating disorders

Teenagers are swapping alcohol and drugs for self-harm and eating disorders

CHRIS GREEN Author Sunday 16 August 2015

Today's teenagers are less likely to get pregnant at a young age and are turning away from drink, drugs and cigarettes – but are increasingly engaging in self-harm, suffering from eating disorders and not getting enough sleep, according to a government paper.

The findings, published by a group of Britain’s most senior civil servants, suggest that the pervasion of the internet and social media, coupled with better parental monitoring and supervision, has prompted major changes in the behaviour of the country’s youth.

At a meeting chaired by Sir Mark Walport, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, experts told the group that “digital immersion” had resulted in a “rapid and dramatic societal shift” which was already having a profound impact on young people.

While some said that the popularity of social media and computer games had left children with “less time and opportunity to participate in traditional risk behaviours” such as underage drinking, others pointed out that the anonymity of the internet had made obtaining “legal highs” and “designer drugs” much easier for them.

Although it acknowledged that there was still “considerable uncertainty” about the impact of the digital world on teenagers, the paper said there had been a clear rise in cyber-bullying and that today’s children were now frequently exposed to “hate content, self-harm and pro-anorexia” websites.

Perhaps surprisingly, the group said “sexting” – the sending and receiving of sexually explicit text messages – was already declining among young people, as was the underage use of social media. But some of the experts raised concerns that the prevalence of online pornography could be having “significant psychological impacts” on children.

For many, the internet provided a valuable source of information and support and could help them answer questions about mental or sexual health, the paper said. But others struggled to control the time they spent online.

“For some children and young people, internet usage approaches levels where it could be classified as an addiction,” the paper said.

The discussion came in the wake of research commissioned by the Government’s “horizon scanning” group, which analyses future opportunities and threats and assesses the impact they might have on policies. Its work is overseen by Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary.

The document said there was good evidence to suggest a “slow and steady decline” in drinking, drug use, smoking, crime, suicide and teenage pregnancy among the country’s young people – but concluded there was “no space for complacency” as different risks were continually emerging and evolving.

A rise in self-harm, especially among teenage girls, was identified as an “area of concern” by the experts, who pointed to recent research suggesting that a third of 15-year-old girls had reported harming themselves on purpose. “Figures for eating disorders and body image issues suggest that these are also significant problems, and are likely to be associated with poor mental health,” the paper added.

Many adolescents also suffered from a “chronic lack of sleep”, while a decline in exercise among both boys and girls was highlighted as a problem with “long-term health implications”. The proportion of boys meeting guidelines for physical activity had fallen from 28 per cent in 2008 to 21 per cent in 2012, the paper said.

However, the paper also stressed that the current generation of young people were not only displaying less risky behaviour than their predecessors, but were also doing positive things for society “that often go unrecognised in public debate”. About 80 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds volunteered in the past year – more than any other age group, it said.

Suzie Hayman, a trustee and spokeswoman for the parenting charity Family Lives, said today’s teenagers could be described as “the sensible generation” when it came to drink, drugs and alcohol. Part of the explanation for the decline in these activities, she said, was that the internet provided a constant source of entertainment.

“Getting drunk and smoking often happens when you are hanging around on street corners with nothing to do. Nowadays you can just reach for a tablet or a mobile phone. You’re never bored, you’re constantly on social media, looking at stuff, discovering stuff – often in safe environments,” she said.

However, she added that self-harm, bullying and eating disorders were “a real worry” and that parents needed to make sure their children felt loved. “We still do seem to have a problem with young people not feeling happy, not feeling supported – communication between parents and children in this country is not as good as it is in others. It seems to be the British style,” she said.

Lucie Russell, the director of media and campaigns at the children’s mental health charity YoungMinds, said the new teenage behaviour highlighted by the paper was “very worrying” and that school and exam-related stress, family breakdown and the internet all played their part.

“Young people are online 24/7. It never lets up,” she said. “There’s a constant need for reassurance. They live their lives in a public domain and feel pressurised to present themselves as the perfect person, with the perfect body.”

The Government has set aside £1.25bn to improve young people’s mental health services over the next five years. Alistair Burt, the community and social care minister, has spoken of the need to “treat a broken mind with the same urgency as a broken leg”.

Earlier this month, NHS England distributed £30m of funding to improve eating disorder services, with the aim of having 95 per cent of patients seen within four weeks by 2020. The Department for Education is also promoting the use of counselling in schools and better teaching about mental health.

Beverley Jullien, the chief executive of the Mothers' Union charity, which offers advice to parents, said children could be taught to be “resilient” to the dangers of the online world without being “wrapped in cotton wool” – but that the pace of change was so rapid thatparents should ensure they educated themselves, as well.

Ms Hayman also pointed out that for teenagers, engaging in risky or rebellious behaviour was perfectly normal and did not necessarily suggest a problem in their personal lives. “It’s what being an adolescent is all about. This is the time in their lives when they’re trying to decide who they are – in making that stand, they often go through rites of passage which involve risky things,” she said. “We need to recognise that. You’ll never eliminate young people taking risks.”

Cancer and hope

Rachel Stratton
I'm Rachel Stratton, a 17 year old girl and identical twin to Jordyn. On August 9th, 2012 I was diagnosed with brain-stem cancer, (DIPG). I'm an active girl in for a long ride!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2015

I have come to the conclusion that hope is what we want it and make it to be.

I can't talk, walk and everything between but I can still hope.

It's pretty embarrassing being 20 and having some people look at me different like I'm 2.

The funny thing is when people think I know something but I took 20 years to find out Genovia isn't a real country.Do you really think I know the secret of life?

"I thought a lot today about things inside but I couldn't tell anyone." I wrote, well I have the people around me write in 2 journals each night.
That's what I had written for yesterday. It's true I think a lot-normally but I cant say it. It stinks.

I don't really do anything besides eat and sleep but visitors exhaust me, so I'll update everybody this way.

I'm not doing well but I have a lot of peace. That's what counts I guess.

So I'm still hanging in there. Barely but surely. And I'll keep hanging until I can sew (with energy) again.

Much love

And a big thanks for your love, prayers and kind words--

Rachel

Mom Describes Daughter’s Descent Into Mental Illness And Suicide

The Bravest Person I Have Ever Known’: Mom Describes Daughter’s Descent Into Mental Illness And Suicide

Amy Capetta
April 22, 2015

Last month, 28-year-old Natalie Fuller from Baltimore, Maryland ended her life by stepping in front of a train. Her mother, Doris — with whom Natalie authored a bestselling book at age 16 called “Promise You Won’t Freak Out: A Teenager Tells Her Mother the Truth About Boys, Booze, Body Piercing, and Other Touchy Topics (and Mom Responds)”— wrote a heartfelt and honest piece for The Washington Post detailing the mental illness that consumed her daughter’s existence.

“My daughter lived more than six years with an incurable disease that filled her head with devils that literally hounded her to death, and she did it while laughing, painting, writing poetry, advocating and bringing joy to the people around her,” she stated. “She was the bravest person I have ever known, and her suicide doesn’t change that.”

During Natalie’s senior year of college, she suffered from her first psychotic episode. “In the span of a few weeks she went from being a dazzling young adult with the world at her feet to a psych-ward patient with an arrest record. Only much later did I learn what a devastatingly common trajectory this was,” Doris wrote.

Although Natalie went one-week without sleep, the family chalked it up to jet lag (at the time she was traveling abroad). A few months after that when Natalie complained about her friends whispering behind her back, Doris assumed it was typical college roommate drama. “With no history of mental illness in the family, auditory hallucinations never crossed anyone’s mind.”

But about six months later, Natalie believed even strangers were talking about her, which led to her multiple arrests for crimes, like trespassing. The police finally brought her to the hospital one night where she was committed to the state’s public psychiatric hospital. Natalie was treated for severe bipolar disorder with psychosis and was released after two months.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 75 percent of lifetime cases of mental health conditions begin by age 24, and more than 25 percent of college students have been diagnosed or treated by a professional for a mental health condition within the past year.

“Mental illness tends to present itself around 18 or 19, and very often this is when young adults are going off to college,”Dr. Robi Ludwig, a nationally recognized psychotherapist who is a regular contributor on CNN and The Fox News Channel, tells Yahoo Health. “So it makes it particularly hard to identify the difference between just typical adolescent/early adulthood issues versus is there a mental illness going on.”

After Natalie’s initial diagnosis and treatment, Doris says her daughter stayed with her for the summer and described her as being “sane, revived and seemingly her vibrant old self.” Then she returned to college in the fall to restart her senior year — and, as is common in these scenarios, stopped taking her meds. “Within minutes of walking through the door for a weekend at home, her delusion-loaded thinking and behavior made it obvious that what I eventually came to think of as ‘the demons’ were back.”

Natalie was re-committed to the hospital and Doris admits that this relapse was more severe than her initial psychotic break. “Her second commitment to the hospital lasted 10 months, an eternity in an era where the average psychiatric stay is about five days and most people who are psychotic never get a bed at all.”

While she did rebound again, the devastating cycle continued: Natalie would take her meds, feel stable and then would forgo the meds believing they were no longer necessary. “Yet if she even inadvertently missed a few days of medication — even while receiving therapy and other forms of treatment — the demons would return, and one of the first things they would tell her was to stop taking her medicine,” Doris wrote. “The second thing they would tell her was not to talk to her mom, the most powerful other influence in her life. Each time she obeyed and relapsed, she plunged into a longer free fall, hitting the ground harder, recovering more slowly and returning at a lower plateau.”

Natalie entered what would be her final cycle last fall. “There were no apparent signs of psychosis, and she seemed happy and healthy to everyone around her, but she said we couldn’t see inside her head. In November, six years after her first break, she announced that because she was going to have hallucinations anyway, she was giving up meds for good. Now 28 years old, she stopped the injectable antipsychotics and oral mood stabilizers that had helped her rebuild her life, and her mind began its final, fatal unwinding.”

Ludwig emphasizes the important of parents keeping their eyes and ears open, especially if major depression or mental illness is part of their genetics. “You want to look for anything that is a significant change,” she states. “You know your child’s general personality style, so if you see that they’re withdrawing in a major way, a loss of interest in others or in things they really cared about, a tremendous drop in schoolwork or functioning or problems with concentration or memory, as well as logical thought process, these are all warning signs. Also take notice if someone describes feeling disconnected from themselves or their surroundings, or feeling that things aren’t real.”

As for a typical warning sign of someone who may fall into the psychotic range: “If their sensitivity to sight or sound or smell is suddenly heightened or they suddenly find certain situations over-stimulating.”

Ludwig urges concerned parents to seek help. “If you have a question about your child, you do not have to make a diagnosis alone and should not be burdened with that responsibility,” she states. “They can simply have their child evaluated by a mental health professional who can further assist them about the right intervention. If your child is an adult, you may want to say something like, ‘I’m concerned about you. You don’t seem like yourself and I’m here to support you. Why don’t we find out what’s going on because I’m sure you want to feel better, too.’”

Doris, who is now an executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center—an Arlington-based nonprofit dedicated to eliminating barriers to treatment for people with the most severe psychiatric diseases — has been touched by the outpouring of sympathy and grief from others who have also been affected by this illness. She also shared that Natalie had hoped to become a peer counselor since she felt the mental health system needed to be reformed.

“’Natalie will help our society to move forward,’ a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital wrote me upon learning of the suicide. ‘She is helping us to look at mental illness with the respect, the compassion and the dignity it deserves.’ I hope so. Natalie would have loved that legacy.”

Here’s What Experts Had to Say About That Viral Child-Abduction Video

Here’s What Experts Had to Say About That Viral Child-Abduction Video


Beth Greenfield
Senior Writer
Yahoo Parenting
May 4, 2015

If anything’s guaranteed to work parents of small children into a complete and instant panic, it’s mention of kidnappers lurking at local playgrounds. To wit: a YouTube video aiming to warn moms and dads of such abductions is quickly going viral, drawing more than a million views and steadily climbing since being posted on Saturday. It’s the work of popular video blogger Joey Saladino, known by his huge online following as extreme prankster JoeySalads.




“As I was thinking of extreme prank ideas, I had an idea where I would abduct a child, but I can’t abduct random people’s kids, so I scrapped the idea,” Saladino, 21, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Then I thought, I wonder how easy it would be to abduct someone else’s child? I thought I should put this to the test because no one has ever tried it, and I thought: Are kids actually safe from predators?”

So he proceeded with what he calls his “social experiment.” After getting permission from three parents who were watching their kids play in New York City parks, Saladino approached each child with his cute puppy, and then asked if they’d like to come with him to see more. Three out of three said yes, to each mom’s apparent shock. “No parent knows how their child would react to a stranger,” says Saladino, who has made a lucrative career with his videos, drawing more than 282,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and more than 69,000 Twitter followers. “So that’s why I had to put it to the test.”

YouTube prankster Joey Saladino’s video warning about child abductions has gone viral (Photo: Joey Salads)

But his test is nothing new or surprising, according to Nancy McBride, executive director for the Florida regional office of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Kids. “It’s been done a hundred times,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “And young children are easily tricked, which is why we tell parents they have to stay with their young kids.” She also notes that the results of Saladino’s video are hardly accurate. “A really important piece to me is that this guy sat down with each mom, which I’m sure the kids saw,” she says. “So the perception [for them] is that this guy’s okay.”

Saladino notes in his video that 700 kids are abducted each day, presumably in the way he’s warning viewers about, and he tells Yahoo Parenting that he got that number from McBride’s agency. McBride says it’s unclear which stat he was referencing, but points out that one of the biggest numbers, that of all the kids who were reported missing in 2014 — around 467,000 — includes runaways, parental abductions, kids who got lost, and more. Regarding kids being snatched by strangers in the way Saladino warns about, she and others in the field point to statistics showing that the majority of abductions don’t go down in this way.

“Only about 100 children (a fraction of 1%) are kidnapped each year in the stereotypical stranger abductions you hear about in the news,” note stats from the Polly Klaas Foundation, which provided the literature, “Child Safety Kit: Teach Abduction Prevention Without Scaring Your Child (or Yourself),” as its response to Saladino’s video.

Girls Lured to Meet Online Stranger in Shocking Social Experiment

Girls Lured to Meet Online Stranger in Shocking Social Experiment
Aug 14, 2015, 3:06 PM ET
By ABC NEWS via GOOD MORNING AMERICA


ABC Latest News | Latest News Videos

A social experiment posted on YouTube is getting a lot of attention -- an attempt to show how easy it can be for strangers to target teens.

In the video, which has garnered more than 24 million hits, a 13-year-old girl is seen meeting up with a complete stranger she met online, but what she doesn’t know is that this is an experiment and her father is waiting close by.

The young man she’s meeting in the park after texting with him is Coby Persin, a YouTube star known for silly and outrageous pranks. But this stunt is catching the attention of millions of parents who are now asking if their kids are also at risk.

“I went into this and didn’t know it was going to work, and then I knew it was going to be a big video when I showed it to my mother and then she cried,” Persin told ABC News. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’”

To begin, Persin made a Facebook profile posing as a 15-year-old boy.

“With the parents’ permission I friend requested three girls, ages 14, 13 and 12-years old,” he explains in the video.

After texting and chatting on the phone, he told the girls he wanted to meet up. Persin was in touch with the girls’ parents the entire time, keeping them informed about the exchanges and conversations they were having.

“I don’t think she’s going to open the door,” one father told him.

“She just said, ‘I think my dad’s asleep. You can come now,” Persin told the dad of his daughter’s actions.

The dramatic video is sparking a barrage of comments on social media, most saying it’s hard to watch but needs to be seen.

Some teens were more cautious than to meet up with Persin, however. He says he initially contacted six young girls and three of them quickly backed away from him online.

Child safety advocate Callahan Walsh is the National Outreach Coordinator for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“It does pain me to watch this video,” he said. “We do want to keep our kids safe, but we don’t encourage parents to resort to scare tactics like this one. It’s really about ongoing conversations that they need to have with their children. I’m sure these three girls in this case learned their lesson, but again it’s not something we parents should have to resort to.”

Callahan says parents can show this video to their children as a “teachable moment.”

He recommends having ongoing conversation with your kids.

“Pertaining to this video particularly, I think the most important thing is for children to never go meet somebody in the real world that they met online if they don’t already know them in person,” Callahan explained. “So meeting somebody that they just met online is the number one thing that we tell parents to tell their kids, ‘Don’t do.’”

Another topic to discuss with your children is making sure they aren’t giving out their personal information.

“Making sure that you’re not putting out your full name, your address, things like that, and only allowing people to view your page that you know in real life,” he said. “You shouldn’t be accepting friend requests from people that you don’t know.”

Man reveals how easy it is for pedophiles to prey on teen girls via social media

Man reveals how easy it is for pedophiles to prey on teen girls via social media by luring three out of their homes while their parents watch on in horror

Coby Persin, 21, is a YouTube star who performs pranks and experiments
The New Yorker chatted up three young girls, aged 12, 13, and 14, by pretending to be a 15-year-old who lived nearby
They all agreed to meet him when their parents weren't around, with one even climbing into his van


By CARLY STERN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 17:21, 12 August 2015 | UPDATED: 22:05, 12 August 2015


Pedophiles have been hiding behind the anonymity of the internet for years - but unfortunately, it seems that some teens and tweens think their parents' warnings about the dangers of speaking to strangers online are just unwarranted overreactions.

YouTube star Coby Persin, 21, set out to help some New York-area parents teach their children how real the threat of pedophiles, rapists, and abductors truly is, posing as a teen himself and luring their young daughters into potentially dangerous situations by first striking up conversations with them on Facebook.

'How easy is it for a pedophile to pick up an underage child using social media?' he asks in a new video, quickly proving that it's not very difficult at all.







'I made a fake profile on Facebook posing as a 15-year-old boy,' Coby explains, showing off a page for a made-up teen named Jason Biazzio. 'With their parents' permission, I friend-requested three girls ages 14, 13, and 12.'

Coby didn't have to work hard to set the groundwork for a first meeting with any of these young ladies, merely chatting with them online or via text for three or four days before arranging to meet up at their homes or somewhere nearby.

'What we found in this video is shocking and something everyone should see,' he says.

The first girl he puts to the test is named Mikayla. Mikayla proves very trusting, and quickly takes 'Jason's' word for it that he is another local kid - though the two have obviously never met before and have no friends in common.

After he sends her a friend request, the 13-year-old asks where she knows him from.

'I just moved from Florida to your town,' he says with a smiley-face emoji. Coby doesn't even have to specifically name her town for her to decide that he is safe.

Running it past mom and dad: He set up a fake Facebook profile and contact three young girls with their parents' permission

Liar, liar: Coby posed online as 'Jason Biazzio', a 15-year-old boy

Noel Gallagher condemns Ed Sheeran for 'selling out'

Noel Gallagher condemns Ed Sheeran for 'selling out'
Former Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher has slammed 'subversive' pop star Ed Sheeran for selling out

By Agency 9:13PM GMT 13 Jan 2015

Link to the ARTICLE and PHOTO HERE

Musician Noel Gallagher expressed his dismay at the success of Sheeran, and the run of three sell-out nights which he will play at Wembley in July in a newly published interview.

In an interview with NME he said: "I don't think I can live in a world where that's even possible. When you hear that kind of polished pop and then there's a ginger guy with a guitar it seems subversive, but it's not."

Noel Gallagher has previously spoken out about "middle-class" musicians including Sheeran for not playing at the Teenage Cancer Trust gigs the former Oasis singer organises.

Gallagher said he had been let down by other musicians, including Ed Sheeran and Grammy-winners Mumford & Sons, who had originally agreed to play the gigs but were later changed their minds.

"What’s interesting is all the working-class bands said yes straight off the bat, no inkling of when it was. The middle-class bands said yes and wriggled out of it. I dunno what that means, but it must mean something," he said at the time.

How pressures of online life undermine teenage girls’ self-esteem

Revealed: how pressures of online life undermine teenage girls’ self-esteem

A major survey of 30,000 pupils reveals that teenagers – especially girls – increasingly doubt themselves. Both the economic downturn and cyber bullying are taking their toll

Daniel Boffey
Sunday 9 November 2014 00.04 GMT

The self-esteem of teenage girls has fallen significantly since the start of the economic downturn seven years ago and the boom in the use of social media and online communication, a major survey of 30,000 school pupils has revealed.

Analysts who compile the survey for schools across the country have reported a worrying drop in the number of 14- and 15-year-olds, particularly girls, who say they feel highly confident in their own worth.

After consistent year-on-year increases since the early 1990s in the number of young people scoring in the highest bracket of self-esteem, a sudden and dramatic change occurred after 2007, according to the Schools Health Education Unit, which works with local authorities to monitor the health and lifestyles of pupils.

From a peak in 2007, when 41% of 14- and 15-year-old girls reported high self-esteem, that figure has fallen to 33%. There has also been a less significant drop in self-esteem among boys of the same age, from 55% in the highest bracket in 2007 to 50% in 2013, according to the survey, released on Sunday.

Dr David Regis, research manager at the unit, said that the correlation with the economic downturn could not be ignored and that more attention might need to be paid to the sensitivities of young people to their families’ plight during the recession and slow recovery.

The unit also suggested that teenagers were, more than ever, having their lives exposed through online communication and that schools should examine whether they were educating their pupils properly on the dangers.

Three in four 14- and 15-year-old girls have chatted on the internet and 13% have received a message that scared or upset them. One in five had chatted with people they did not know. A third of all pupils (34%) in one authority had looked online for pornographic or violent images, films or games.

Regis said: “We have always been concerned about the emotional wellbeing of young people. A while ago we took stock of young people’s emotional wellbeing as seen in our figures. At the time, we were fairly sanguine, as we thought that, while different worries came and went, young people’s self-esteem was holding up well and even increasing.

“But it is no longer the case: the data series shows a peak in the percentage of year 10 females [aged 14-15] scoring in the highest bracket of self-esteem scores in 2007, but the figures in that group have since declined.”


Angela Balding, who managed the survey for the unit, which has carried out the polling since 1976, said: “The 2008 date coincides with the economic recession, so that’s a plausible explanation of what we see – but we are also aware of new pressures about being online and of online bullying.

“We can also see among the pupils with low self-esteem that they are much more likely than their peers to have experienced bullying at or near school in the last year. We don’t know if that’s because bullying causes a drop in self-esteem, or if pupils with low self-esteem are more likely to be picked on, or both.”

A third of girls (31%) aged 10 or 11 fear bullying at least sometimes. One in five girls of that age said their school did not deal with bullying very well. Ellie Dibben, 18, from Hertfordshire, who is a member of the 18-strong “advocates”, a panel of the charity Girlguiding, which examines issues pertinent to young women, said she recognised the downturn in self-esteem among her peers.

She said: “I think that recently we have had a very fast period of change in terms of online habits. But while we have had these huge changes come in, we have not had changes in the way we are educated in an era of an increasingly sexualised media. Some young people have no idea how to deal with this.”

The survey also reveals a worrying attitude among teenage girls to eating. It found that 14% of 14- and 15-year-old girls have nothing to eat or drink for breakfast, with 13% having only a drink. Nearly two in three (62%) of girls of the same age and 53% of year 12- and 13-year-olds would like to lose weight.

However, there is good news in terms of the attitudes of teenagers towards alcohol and tobacco. Since the mid-1990s there has been a general decline in the percentage of 14-15-year-olds who smoke regularly, the survey found. For example, in 1985, 33% of 14-15-year old girls said they had never smoked. In 2013, this had risen to 60%.

About 97% of 10-11-year-olds say they have never smoked. This figure drops to 66% (boys) and 60% (girls) by the time they are 14-15 years old. More than a third (35%) of 12-15-year-olds live in a home where someone smokes. One in five (22%) of 14-15-year-old girls reported smoking and 27% reported drinking alcohol “in the last seven days”.

10% of all teenagers have engaged in self-harm

One in four Australian teenage girls has self-harmed, says report

Largest-ever survey of youth mental health has found 10% of all teenagers have engaged in self-harm, and one in every 13 has contemplated suicide

Australian Associated Press
Friday 7 August 2015 07.31 BST

Alarming new figures show one in four Australian teenage girls have engaged in self-harm.

The largest-ever survey of youth mental health found 10% of teenagers had engaged in self-harm, and one in 13 had contemplated suicide. One in 40 actually attempted it.

The two-year survey of 6,300 families found a quarter of girls aged 16 and 17 had engaged in self-harm, with one in five meeting the clinical criteria for major depressive disorder.

One in seven children and young people had experienced a mental disorder in the past year and almost one third were suffering more than one disorder.

Health minister Sussan Ley described the report on Friday as “confronting, sad and shocking”.

She was concerned that while ADHD cases were falling, there had been a rise in major depressive disorder.

But it was encouraging that more young people were using support services compared with in 1998, when the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents survey was first conducted, she said.

“As a parent it’s heartbreaking to see these prevalent stories of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidal tendencies amongst our young people, let alone as health minister,” Ley said.

“We must recognise in years gone by many of these cases we’re hearing about today would have simply gone unaccounted for while people suffered in silence.”

Ley said she was proud that most young people were turning to sport and other activities rather than drugs and alcohol to address mental health problems.

Technological advances mean the $6.6m federal government-funded survey is likely to be more accurate than when it was first conducted almost 20 years ago, because young people can now participate without parental supervision.

The government says depression reporting rates almost doubled when young people first filled out the survey themselves.

Mental Health Australia chief executive Frank Quinlan said the distressing figures highlighted the need for more information and a national mental health plan involving all levels of government.

“There’s still an uncomfortableness about mental illness that means we don’t treat it in the same way we treat other mainstream health issues,” he said.

“The health minister can’t solve this on her own – we need the minister for employment, we need the minister for social services and we need the minister for defence and treasury and finance to all come together on this.”

An expert reference group set up by the federal government to map out a plan on how to implement the recommendations of a review of the mental health system will report back to Ley in October.