Nature Connected Psychiatry Used as Stress Reduction and Prevention Medicine Reduces PTSD Symptoms

Nature Connected Psychiatry Used as Stress Reduction and Prevention Medicine Reduces PTSD Symptoms

 

San Juan Island (MMD Newswire) March 16, 2011 -- An article that focuses on psychiatry and connection has been published in "Missoulian," entitled "Family Health: Connecting With Nature Relieves Stress" The author is Psychiatrist Phillip Holman MD / CPG Medical Director of Psychiatric Services at Boozeman General Hospital.

Dr. Holman offers a few strategies that, in his professional and personal experiences, appear to be useful stress relieving tools. They have produced successful results for his patients, as well as himself.

Citing Dr. Larry Dossey, author of "Reinventing Medicine," Dr. Holman uses the stress management activities in natural areas that have been developed by Dr. Michael Cohen's Project NatureConnect at Akamai University. Cohen has demonstrated these activities to be an important application of ecopsychology, one that genuinely connects us with the often the ignored source of spirit and wellness found in nature.

Cohen says Dr. Holman's findings are important because excessive stress is the leading cause of most illness and disorders that we suffer. "In addition," Cohen notes, "Nature is an often overlooked but significant healer. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) victims recover by connecting in nature to "something larger than themselves."

A description of Dr. Holman's article accompanied by a link to it along with many examples that further Dr. Holman's findings has been placed on the Internet.

In his book, Educating Counseling and Healing with Nature, Cohen links to many studies that show how our excessively nature-separated lives, make our inner nature feel unfulfilled, stressed and lackluster. This loss causes us to crave natural sensations or depend upon artificial, excessive and often irresponsible substitutes for them.

Cohen demonstrates that backyard or backcountry, doing sensory nature-reconnecting activities helps us let Earth balance us and teach us missing essentials that we need for eliminating destructive stress."

"Stress can more effectively be reduced by adding educating, counseling and healing with nature activities to stress treatment procedures depending upon the individual and the type of stressfulness or pressures an individual is encountering" says Dr. Cohen. Some of his students have added them to mindfulness, meditation and yoga, when practiced together or separately. This practice is thought to create better awareness of the connection between the unity of the mind and body. Nature connection activities strengthen the connection as they help an individual include the powers of the natural world, their other body, in it.

The addition of nature's healing ways helps us be conscious of our mind, feelings and spirit while they are beneficially interlaced with the self-correcting and restorative powers of nature's flow, in and around us.

The pioneering mission of Project NatureConnect is to enable our thoughts and feelings to tap into nature's renewing natural attraction "love" that flows in, around and through us. The online program's subsidized, UNESCO approved, training courses and degrees help us activate 53 natural senses that we inherit so we can make conscious contact with the life-nurturing attraction energy of the eons found in natural areas, backyard or backcountry.

The Internet addresses of the newly released web pages are

http://www.ecopsych.com/stress.html

For further information visit http://www.ecopsych.com

Contacts:

Dr. Michael Cohen 360-378-6313, email .

Barbara Huning MA LP at 507-452-0200, email .

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Institute Founder and Director:

Recipient of the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award, Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D., is a Program Director of the Institute of Global Education, where he coordinates its Integrated Ecology Department and Project NatureConnect. He also serves on the Ecopsychology faculty of Portland State University and Akamai University. Dr. Cohen has founded sensory environmental education outdoor programs independently and for the National Audubon Society and Lesley University (AEI). He conceived the 1985 National Audubon Conference "Is the Earth a Living Organism," and is an award winning author of "Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature," "The Web Of Life Imperative"and "Reconnecting With Nature." A video about his lifework may be viewed at http://www.imdb.comtitle/tt1357054

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