[PBS is focusing on stories about children, mental health, violence, and disaster trauma]
"Two years later, John breathes. He counts. He leaves the room if he needs to calm down. He hasn’t been able to shake all the blood he’s seen on television in recent months -- most of it at the hands of young men -- and he’s promised himself there must be a better way to deal with anger.
“It scares me what a person is really capable of doing,” said John, who’s now 11. “When I get mad, my adrenaline is out there and it’s horrible. But I’ve learned how to stop and breathe....
"But a new program piloted at John’s middle school on the outskirts of Chillicothe, Ohio, may help prove that short bursts of therapeutic exercise, even if practiced in a standard health class, can drastically improve an adolescent’s chances of dealing with stress in environments as diverse as inner-city Los Angeles and rural Kentucky.
"It’s called COPE, short for Creating Opportunities for Personal Empowerment. The kid-friendly program takes key concepts from “cognitive behavior therapy” -- a branch of psychotherapy shown to be quite effective at treating anxiety disorders and clinical depression -- and incorporates them into lesson plans that nearly any teacher or health professional can deliver....
"While she acknowledges COPE’s not the solution to the systemic problems plaguing the U.S. mental health care system, she believes it can play a part, primarily because it’s so easy for nearly any teacher or health care professional to roll it out...."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/kids-therapy/
See also:
COPE for the treatment of depressed adolescents: lessons learned from implementing an evidence-based practice change.
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