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piqer for: Health and Sanity Global finds
I was born in 1987 in Bucharest. I studied Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Bucharest. For two years I worked in a psychotherapy practice, dealing with gambling addicts. I'm an independent reporter, writing and doing video reportages mostly about social and political issues. I am currently based in Jena.
Podcast: Mothering And Mental Illness
"All In The Mind" podcast looks at how challenging it is to be a parent when you're suffering from a mental illness such as borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is defined by extreme emotional instability and surrounded by stigma.
The episode features Sonya and Emma, two women diagnosed with BPD, who tell about their struggle to raise their children, to tend to their needs appropriately, to not put them at risk because of their own instability.
Psychiatrist Anne Sved Williams, also a guest of the show, developed a program called Mother Infant DBT (dialectic behaviour therapy), specifically for borderline mothers and their babies. She explains in detail what the symptoms are for people with BPD, from lashing out, to gambling and overspending, to suicidal thoughts or self-harm, and the possible consequences on their children.So it's basically a 24-week course with four different modules, each of which are six weeks long, which address how to keep calm through mindfulness, how to understand that you can become distressed and that the distress is temporary and one shouldn't act on that distress, so that's called distress tolerance. Then there's another module called emotional regulation, so learning how to calm yourself down better, and finally the last model is interpersonal effectiveness.
As for what they gained from this program, one of the mothers gives this example:
The stress tolerance really was monumental. When I did the DBT my son was a toddler, so getting through those toddler years and into…he's just about to turn four, and being able to deal with those tantrums and those meltdowns in the shopping centres and not giving in and not losing it and not being that screaming parent that I don't want to be and being able to maintain a level head, that is definitely something that I gained in that.
