Coping With Pandemic: Manage Your Fear

Fear of becoming infected with COVID-19 is reasonable – especially now with plans announced to start reopening Connecticut. There are things you can do to take precautions. C-HIT’s Colleen Shaddox talks with Rajita Sinha, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and Professor in the Child Study Center and of Neuroscience at Yale and director of the Yale Stress Center, about how to take control and manage fear during the pandemic.

Putting a loved one in a nursing home is fraught with emotions and a common one is guilt. People are feeling a resurgence of that guilt now that their loved one is at higher risk. Dr. Kirsten Wilkins, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, talks with Colleen Shaddox about strategies you can use to help your elderly relatives – and yourself – cope during the pandemic.

Adolescents want and need to be with peers, so the isolation imposed by the pandemic is especially hard for them. Dr. Megan V. Smith, associate professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, talks about how parents can support and protect their teenaged children.

COVID-19 has many parents trying to do their jobs from home, supervise their children’s education and provide 24-7 care. Dr. Megan V. Smith, associate professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, discusses ways to keep parents from feeling overwhelmed in high stress situations.

It’s important to practice physical distancing – but not social distancing. People need connection and belonging. Dr. Megan V. Smith, associate professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, discusses ways to battle loneliness.

This is Lost Lives, a new series of podcasts presented by the Connecticut Health I-Team's The Workup. Lost Lives examines the starkest health disparity – life expectancy. People living in poverty in the United States die younger than Americans with more wealth. In each episode, we’re going to create a portrait of someone who suffered early death and talk with family about how the loss continues to shape their own lives. In this episode, Janet Rice, whose son, Shane Oliver, was fatally shot during an argument in 2012.

This is Lost Lives, a new series of podcasts presented by the Connecticut Health I-Team's The Workup. Lost Lives examines the starkest health disparity – life expectancy. People living in poverty in the United States die younger than Americans with more wealth. In each episode, we’re going to create a portrait of someone who suffered early death and talk with family about how the loss continues to shape their own lives. On this episode, Gail Williams, who is 60 and lives in New Haven.

Medical homes are producing better patient outcomes by a variety of measures. Patients seen in this environment get more primary and preventive care and are less likely to end up in the emergency room.

Wanda Perez is grocery shopping at the New Haven Stop & Shop. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of the regular prices of the items she buys, and nothing goes in the cart without Wanda weighing the price and the healthiness of that particular food. She needs to make her SNAP benefits last – and she needs to consider her diet.

Smoking is common among people with mental illness – they buy about 40 percent of the cigarettes sold in the US. Quitting can be harder for people with a mental health diagnosis – and they can have trouble finding the help they need to kick the habit.