Kelly Beck, MS, LMHC

08/06/2026

Cenextra — the first ADHD treatment to receive Breakthrough Device designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — was recently featured in Medscape's July 2026 FDA Psychiatry Roundup!

Developed at the Florida State University Children's Learning Clinic and licensed by the startup Sky Therapeutics, Cenextra uses a patented series of mental exercises presented as popular arcade-style video games designed to strengthen executive functioning in children with ADHD.

CLC founder and FSU Department of Psychology Professor Michael Kofler is pictured.

To learn more, visit: wb.md/4xghw66.

Florida State University Division of Research , FSU Health

08/02/2026

🇺🇸 Did You Know? - One in seven residents in Okaloosa County is a veteran, ranking it the #1 county in Florida for veteran-resident percentage. Okaloosa County has a dedicated staff that serves our Veterans and their dependents in obtaining benefits. All 67 counties in Florida have Veteran Services. This important service is funded with your general fund dollars (property tax dollars), staffed by veterans.👍 It ensures our service members receive the benefits and assistance they deserve for serving their country.

✅Why are Veteran Service Officers Important?
One in seven residents in Okaloosa County is a veteran, ranking it the #1 county in Florida for veteran-resident percentage. Okaloosa County Veteran Service Officers have helped veterans obtain benefits since 1945. They are veterans themselves. They provide a service to veterans and their dependents who would not normally go through the painstaking process of applying for benefits themselves. All 67 counties in the state of Florida have a Veterans Service Officer.

Each Service Officer submits approximately 10 (and often more) benefits claims per week to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), with about half being accepted, resulting in around 250 claims per year. Each veteran who obtains benefits receives about $17,000 per year, which is used to help the veteran with groceries, healthcare, housing and utilities.

👍🤝This has a substantial economic impact on the Okaloosa County economy, especially when you consider the total population of veterans in our area is nearly 40,000, many of whom receive VA benefits. Veteran Services is a department within the County that is funded out of the General Fund (property tax dollars).

ℹ️Learn more about Okaloosa Veterans Services at https://myokaloosa.com/veterans/home

07/27/2026

07/20/2026

🚨 According to Research about our Brain :

This is for the person who lost a parent and found that no amount of warning, no amount of preparation, no amount of knowing it was coming made it land any softer than it did.

Who went through the funeral and handled the arrangements and held everyone else together and then sat alone one evening and felt something so large and so specific that the word grief did not seem nearly enough to contain it.

Who still reaches for the phone sometimes. Who still hears something and thinks I need to tell them that. Who had a whole language with that person, references and shorthand and a way of being known that existed nowhere else, and lost that language along with the person who spoke it.

Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor at the University of Arizona found that the loss of a parent activates the brain’s attachment system in a way that is neurologically distinct from other losses, not because other losses are smaller, but because the parental relationship represents the longest and most formative attachment of a human life. The brain has been calibrated to that particular presence since before it could form any other attachment, encoding that person into its most foundational model of what safety and love and being known feels like.

When that person is gone, the brain does not simply lose a relationship. It loses the original reference point for almost everything it has ever understood about being connected to another human being. The model built first, deepest, most completely, must be rebuilt without the person who was used to build it. And no other loss in a human life requires quite that specific kind of reconstruction.

Researcher Debra Umberson at the University of Texas, who studied parental loss across thousands of people over decades, found that the loss of a parent is one of the most universal and one of the most individually isolating experiences a person can have, precisely because everyone experiences it and yet each person’s grief is entirely specific to the particular relationship they had with that particular person.

The grief cannot be fully shared because the relationship was irreplaceable and unrepeatable. And that specific quality of isolation, of grieving something that nobody else can fully understand because nobody else had what you had with that person, is part of what makes this specific loss carry a weight that does not always have adequate language.

You were known by that person in a way nobody else will ever know you. From the beginning. Before you knew yourself. That is not a small thing to lose. That is one of the most specific and irreplaceable losses available to a human life.

And the grief that size deserves to be treated with the

07/20/2026

🚨 According to Research about our Brain :

This is for the person who has felt, during the hardest season of their grief, that the world expected them to function at a level their brain was genuinely not capable of.

Who returned to work and sat in meetings and responded to emails and performed the ordinary operations of daily life while something in their head was running at a fraction of its normal capacity and nobody around them could see it because grief does not have visible symptoms the way a broken leg does.

Who felt, underneath the performance of functioning, that they were doing something close to fraudulent, not because the grief was not real but because the world was not set up to accommodate grief being real and daily life being simultaneously required.

Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor spent years imaging the brains of grieving people and what she found should be treated as a public health finding rather than an academic one. The grieving brain shows measurable differences in multiple regions compared to a non-grieving brain.

The prefrontal cortex, the region most responsible for executive function, concentration, decision making, and the kind of organized, forward-oriented thinking that modern workplaces are built entirely around, operates at reduced capacity during active grief.

The regions associated with attention and working memory show altered activation patterns. The neural systems responsible for regulating emotional response are working extraordinarily hard simply to maintain the level of functioning that the person is managing to produce.

Researcher Nancy Worden at Antioch University, who has spent decades studying what she calls the tasks of mourning, found that genuine grief work, the active neurological process of integrating a loss into the self and rebuilding the internal model of the world around the absence, requires the same kind of focused, uninterrupted cognitive resources as demanding professional or intellectual work. You cannot grieve fully and function at full capacity simultaneously because the brain does not have the metabolic resources to run both processes at their full requirement at the same time.

This is not a character flaw. It is not weakness. It is basic neuroscience. And it means that the functioning you managed to produce while grieving was not your normal functioning. It was something closer to extraordinary. Something that nobody recognized as such because the grief was invisible and the expectation was that you would simply continue.

You continued. Through something the brain scans show was genuinely, measurably, neurologically one of the most demanding experiences the human brain can sustain.

Whatever you managed to do during that time, however small it looked from the outside, was more than it appeared.

And you deserved more accommodation and more recognition for what it actually cost than anyone.

07/03/2026

So very true!