03. Pediatric Hero: Building Safe Spaces for Kid's Emotions with Dr. Mark Sloane

https://swiy.co/WhatAreYourThoughts

Welcome to Pediatric Meltdown, the podcast for busy pediatricians who want to better understand children's emotional health, behaviors, and gain the skills and knowledge to help them thrive. I am your host, Lia Gaggino. In this episode, I brought in Dr. Mark Sloane. He is a board-certified pediatrician and an adolescent medicine specialist.

Let’s dive into Dr. Mark’s story of how important it is to build a safe space for kids with mental illnesses and how to get involved in your community to help with kids’ healing process. This is a movement that is not restricted to medical practitioners alone, everybody can make an impact on kids’ lives and we are all in this together.

[00:01 - 11:02] Opening Segment

• Introducing today's guest, Dr. Mark Sloane
• Dr. Mark talks about his career
• He wasn't ready to practice because of limited training
• He did ADHD-related work
• Worked in a Trauma Center
• Most moms were exposed to drugs, alcohol and domestic violence
• How can we help kids with their functional outcomes?
• Working across different systems
• How do we achieve better outcomes and success?

[11:03 - 28:11] Building Safe Spaces for Kids’ Emotions

• Dr. Mark talks about continuing to improve the medication process dealing with kid's mental illness
• Looking for a holy grail pay off
• How do we make things safe for kids with trauma?
• Dr. Mark talks about using the same med-model on kids of different ages
• Some families have no problems with their older kids but struggle on the younger ones
• Kids being traumatized by the system
• Getting compared to their siblings
• Where do kids feel safe?
• With school, teachers and their doctors
• Helping them remember somebody they trusted
• The Power of Adult's Resilience
• If a kid has an adult that is crazy about them, this will help them big time with their healing process

[28:12 - 38:36] Collaborating with Other People

• Medicine and Prescriptions are just not enough
• Medicine only works to a certain extent
• Anybody can make an impact on kids' recovery process
• You don't have to be a psychiatrist
• Dr. Mark talks about bringing in different people to help with primary care work for kids
• Making connections
• Schools need to work with doctors and vice versa
• How do you get everybody on the table?
• Having the right infrastructure buildings and personnel
• We will all benefit from doing it. It's hard but worth it!

[38:37 - 44:40] Closing Segment

• There are so many ways that we can help and support these programs
• We are all in this together
• Final words from me and Dr. Mark

Tweetable Quotes:

"If a kid has one adult that's irrationally crazy about them that can matter and that's enough." - Dr. Mark Sloane

"Primary care has been traumatized and the answer is relational change by reaching out to other people to help us mend our own trauma" - Dr. Lia Gaggino

Resources Mentioned:

• Thinking Developmentally - Andrew Garner
• Children's Trauma Assessment Center - WMU Kalamazoo
• Bruce Perry, MD, PhD – www.bdperry.com
• Ross Greene, PhD – www.drrossgreene.com

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