2012 Richmond Mental Health and Addictions Program-Wide Educational Worksho...
Event Information
Description
Due to Hurricane Sandy Dr. Nancy McWilliams is unable to come and all registration fees will be immediately refunded and we will notify everyone once a new date is scheduled. Apologies for any inconvenience and thanks for your understanding. Cheers, Harry Karlinsky
Mental Health: An Endangered Concept?
Friday, November 2nd, 2012
Registration ends October 19, 2012. No on-site Registrations
8:45 AM - 4:30 p.m.(Registration begins at 8:15 AM)
Ralph Fisher Auditorium
Richmond Hospital
7000 Westminster Highway
This year’s focus for The Richmond Hospital Department of Psychiatry’s annual educational workshop will be the challenging topic of whether mental health is an endangered concept. Our distinguished speaker will be Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP Full Professor, Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology, Rutgers University
Schedule:
Course Presenter:
Nancy McWilliams, PhD
9:00 to 10:30
Overview of the recent paradigm shift away from the concept of therapy as a healing relationship and toward the assumption that therapy consists of specific techniques directed at discrete disorder categories. Discussion will review the pressures on therapists not simply to base their work on scientific evidence, but to behave as if psychotherapy is like research. The far-reaching implications of this trend for our field will be examined. The case for maintaining a focus on overall wellness rather than simple symptom relief will be emphasized.
10:30 to 10:45
Break
10:45 to 12:00
Consideration of traditional, clinically inferred aspects of mental and emotional health: Love, work, play, attachment pattern, sense of agency, self and object constancy, ego strength and resilience, realistic and reliable self-esteem, affect and thought tolerance and ability to inhibit action.
12:00 to 1:00
Lunch
1:00 to 2:30
Insight into illness /reality testing /ego-alien quality of problems, capacity for mentalization and reflective functioning, flexibility of defenses, balance between self-definition and self-in-relationship, sense of vitality, acceptance of realistic limitation /capacity to grieve.
2:30 to 2:45
Break
2:45 to 4:00
DVD of Dr. McWilliams with a patient, illustrating the importance of thinking about clients in terms of overall mental health and wellness concepts.
4:00 to 4:30
Reception
Description of the Content:
It has become common to think that psychotherapy is simply about symptom relief and behavior change, hence the recent relabeling of many facilities and services in terms of “behavioral health.” Such a focus reflects the interests of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, each of which has a stake in defining psychological health narrowly, as the absence of observable symptoms and problematic behaviors. It may also reflect the needs of researchers to operationalize therapy outcomes in statistically manageable ways, but the research paradigm may have been misapplied to the very different realm of clinical practice. Dr. McWilliams will review both traditional and more recently formulated aspects of mental health, such as ego strength, affect tolerance, security of attachment, mentalization, and capacity for intimacy, and will discuss their implications for psychotherapy.
Course Goals and Learning Objectives
The main goal of this presentation will be to expand the conceptual horizons of contemporary therapists. Despite being besieged by pressures to narrow their focus to the immediate relief of symptoms, they need to be able to formulate the needs of their clients at a more transcendent level. To prevent relapse, increase general life satisfaction, and set in motion a cycle of personal growth, it is critical to be able to have a concept of the elements of mental and emotional health.
After this presentation, participants will be able to:
- Describe the recent history of the concept of mental health and the controversies that have attended it.
- Discriminate between research paradigms and clinical paradigms and avoid misapplying the former to the latter.
- Distinguish between self-in-relation and self-definition orientations and appreciate their implications for psychotherapy.
- Apply Krause’s work on facial affect in psychotherapy to their understanding of their clinical work.
- Translate to their therapeutic work sixteen elements of mental and emotional health.
Relevant Readings:
Blatt, S. J., & Zuroff, D. C. (2005). Empirical evaluation of the assumptions in identifying evidence based treatments in mental health. Clinical Psychology Review, 25, 459-486.
McWilliams, N. (2005). Preserving our humanity as therapists. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice & Training, 42, 139-151, and Response to Norcross. Same issue, 156-159.
Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65, 98-109.
Accreditation:
As an organization accredited to sponsor continuing medical education for physicians by the Committee on Accreditation of Continuing Medical Education (CACME), the UBC Division of Continuing Professional Development designates this educational program as meeting the accreditation criteria of the College of Family Physicians of Canada for up to 5.75 Mainpro-M1 credits. This program is an Accredited Group Learning Activity eligible for up to 5.75 Section 1 credits as defined by the Maintenance of Certification program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. This program has been reviewed and approved by UBC Division of Continuing Professional Development.
Cheers! (on behalf of Richmond Hospital's Dept of Psychiatry Education Committee)
Harry Karlinsky, MD, MSc, FRCPC
Coordinator of Medical Education/Professional Development
Richmond Mental Health Services
