Blog

By E K Wills Unusual times call for a new approach to schooling. During the lockdown, we are not officially obliged to keep our kids at home if we are essential workers, but many are deciding to keep kids out of school where they can. (Please, teachers, be kind to those parents who do not have an option to do so if kids are too young to stay home alone: just as others need to consider you are also at the forefront of this crisis.) If your children are old enough to stay h

Survival Mode for Mental Health: a list of things you can do to help your mental health during the lockdown

By Dr EK Wills So it seems the health department have evolving recommendations and everyone has different advice to help flatten the curve and make it manageable for the health service. But what does this mean for everyone every day? No one has come out with a simple list of what we need to do to stay safe and generally do our bit for the community. Based on what I have seen so far and what appears to be working across the board, I have generated a simple checklist to make i

By EK Wills No matter what activity you decide to engage your children in they will not generally thank you. No matter how much you may encourage them to persist, a time will come when they will berate you for not choosing what they later want or that you let them quit something they weren’t prepared to persist with. We recently discovered this phenomena with music. The youngest is learning drums and he has now revealed that he doesn’t like loud noises which would explain why

by EK Wills This week was one to test anyone’s patience. And so I was glad to learn about a specific type of therapy that includes skills training on aspects such as distress tolerance and emotion regulation. These are part of a type of therapy called dialectical behavioural therapy or DBT. It was initially developed by Marsha Linehan for people suffering what is labeled borderline personality disorder and, interestingly, she was a sufferer herself. But DBT has now been advoc