Ask the Author: Helaina Hovitz
Answered Questions (5)
Helaina Hovitz
Having the chance to help people and affect real change through the power of the pen...keyboard...phone screen...who knows what's next!
Helaina Hovitz
Never give up. Never. If you know you were born to write, you will find a way, no matter how hard you have to fight to make it work. You will write because you can't imagine doing anything else on earth.
Helaina Hovitz
My continued plight to spread social good news around the Internet and the world, along with stories about mental health, recovery, and other important topics! I'm also working on trying to convince our rescue dog that he doesn't have to try to scare away every big dog we encounter on our four walks a day but he's not gettin' it.
Helaina Hovitz
This book? I did so much research and realized—I think the statistic is twenty-five percent of adults will go through something traumatic, and one out of every two kids. [The American Psychological Association estimates two out of every three kids.] Look at Hurricane Harvey now, those families are definitely going to be suffering from some trauma. There are natural disasters, medical trauma, cancer in a family, accidents, domestic abuse, crime in a neighborhood –so many things lead to trauma. We really need more awareness around how complex it can be, because there are so many misdiagnoses, especially because the symptoms change over time as new stressors come into your life. So, I wanted to write a book that connected the dots for people. You might not see a connection between a girl screaming and clinging to her boyfriend on the street and having a crazy reaction to a fight in public and trauma, but I can connect the dots all the way there for you. I wanted to use my experience to help young people who are struggling, and also to help adults with my experience.
Helaina Hovitz
There were so many reasons. I had spent years going to all these different professionals trying to figure out what was ‘wrong’ with me, and all these medications and diagnoses and therapy, and nothing was working, it was just getting worse. When I finally got the PTSD diagnosis and got the right therapy and started to really get better, and I had some recovery under my belt, it was my senior year of college. I had to write a senior thesis, which I decided would be a collection of essays about what my New York looked like almost 10 years after 9/11. I also had to do an independent study. Someone said, “I wonder what happened to your other classmates, and if they had similar experiences.” So, I started reaching out to my former classmates, and I interviewed almost 20 parents and kids about what their lives had been like, and I heard so much of my story and my experience in theirs.
Some of them hadn’t even heard of PTSD, some of them had never been to therapy. But they had been living with these things –were afraid to leave home, didn’t want to be away from their parents, people isolated themselves and didn’t want to do anything anymore, they wanted to stay locked in their rooms… and then there were the ones that acted out, would throw furniture at their parents. And I get goosebumps while I talk about this, because it’s so upsetting to me, that they just thought that this was how they were, that this was how their lives were now. And they all said to me, you’re the first one who asked me my story, and that’s when I knew that it was going to be an entire book.
Some of them hadn’t even heard of PTSD, some of them had never been to therapy. But they had been living with these things –were afraid to leave home, didn’t want to be away from their parents, people isolated themselves and didn’t want to do anything anymore, they wanted to stay locked in their rooms… and then there were the ones that acted out, would throw furniture at their parents. And I get goosebumps while I talk about this, because it’s so upsetting to me, that they just thought that this was how they were, that this was how their lives were now. And they all said to me, you’re the first one who asked me my story, and that’s when I knew that it was going to be an entire book.
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