Blog

The Child Life Specialist program has a bunch of exciting activities planned in celebration of Child Life Month! March 1 The program has been invited to attend Education Hour with the Child Life staff at Loma Linda University Children's Health. Allie's Helping Hands, a program that helps siblings of chronically ill children, will be presenting.

One of the major shifts occurring in the United States is the aging of our population. It's projected that within just a couple of decades older people will outnumber children for the first time. By the year 2035, there will be approximately 78 million people aged 65 years and older.

The chances of you or someone you know being impacted by mental health challenges are very high. According to Mental Health America, 18% of adults in the United States have a mental health condition. That’s one out of five people--or over 43 million Americans. In addition, nearly half are also struggling with substance abuse. However, about 9 million people report having an unmet need. In California specifically, over 65% of people struggling with a mental health challenge are not getting the resources they need.

Disruptive behaviors are a common occurrence in children. While almost all children exhibit some level of rule breaking, defiance, or acting out, only a subset of children may need intervention to curb these behaviors. Maya Boustani, PhD, clinical child psychologist and Assistant Professor at Loma Linda University’s School of Behavioral Health, Department of Psychology, answers some of the most common questions about Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).

Over the summer, the Child Life Specialist MS cohort had the incredible opportunity to travel to China to share the concepts of child life internationally and to interact with patients, families, and professionals from a different culture. Throughout the course of our time in China, we traveled to three different hospitals located in Hangzhou and Quzhou.

During the summer of 2018, directly following graduation festivities, I was honored to be a part of a team that traveled to Angola, Africa, to provide health education via health fairs and medical assistance, as well as community-building and networking for the future. Before the trip began, there were many planning meetings held on how best to serve the people of Angola, specifically in Bongo, Huambo, and Luanda. In the wonderful group I was with, the mental health team, our main focus was to provide mental health support utilizing the Community Resiliency Model (CRM).

This summer, the School of Behavioral Health made an historic visit to Samoa. One of the School’s largest trips ever, it included five faculty and 12 students from the departments of Counseling and Family Sciences, Psychology, and Social Work and Social Ecology. This trip was the result of an exciting collaboration between SBH, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), and the Samoan government.

When I made the choice to come to Loma Linda University, I knew that being in a practicum that was exclusively clinical was important to me. I also knew that I wanted to work in a psychiatric facility. The first time I met Professor Forrester, he explained what options I had after getting to know more about the sort of social worker that I wanted to be. He immediately recommended that I interview at the LLU Murrieta Campus Behavioral Medicine Center when he realized how much I loved psychotherapy.

The School of Behavioral Health recently hosted three alumni meetings at Starbucks locations in the Inland Empire. These meetings provided an opportunity for alumni to reconnect with one another, network, and hear the latest information about events occurring within the School and the broader University.

Promoting the social work core value of service, the Phi Alpha Honor Society, Iota Pi Chapter's finale for the academic year was the "Laundry Gift Basket" project benefiting homeless families transitioning into permanent housing. Members of the Honor Society were aware that the cost of obtaining household essentials was prohibitive for many homeless families, so Phi Alpha partnered with Inland Housing Solutions (formerly known as Inland Temporary Homes) to provide some needed items.