Best in Mental Health (7/27/15 – 8/9/15)

Below is a round-up of some of the latest news in mental health (and more)!

This week’s wrap-up has the following main themes:

Advocacy/Racism
Therapy/Relationships
Technology and Mental Health
Healthcare
Career/NonProfit
Self Care

Advocacy/Racism

• Human Rights and Torture (part 2 of 2) – the assumptions and root causes that drive immigration to the United States, and the unintended consequences of U.S. policy in this area.
• NASW-SC Hosts Chat on Structural Racism – head of NASW’s Department fo Social Justice and Human Rights, discussed NASW’s efforts to end racism.
• Prejudice causes the perception of threat – sadly, research suggests that people can be easily conditioned to feel prejudice and that threat perception serves as a justification for why we might not like someone.
• Resources for White People Willing to Educate Themselves on Racism –  helpful links such as Understanding Whiteness, Privilege and Parenting Racially-Conscious Children.
• Why Paternity Leave Is Important For Families – the impact of paternity leave on employee performance and overall life satisfaction.

Therapy/Relationships

• Connecting With Your Child…Through Play – the benefits of play to connect with your kids and for your own wellbeing.
• Depression & Motherhood: Facts, Help, & How to Overcome –  helpful identifying information and guidance. Also note that 1 in 4 new fathers also experience symptoms of postpartum depression within 12 months of childbirth [Scale for Assessing Male Depression].   The new era of personalised depression treatment will be combining knowledge from neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology.
• The Divorce Dividend: When Children of Divorce Marry – children of divorce are more likely to nurture and cherish their marriages.
• Holding the Hope – the importance of acknowledging our clients’  pain while holding for them the hope that times will improve again.
• How Do I say No & Feel OK About It? – an exercise that you or your clients can use recognize and accept the emotions that precede a desire to say “no” to a particular request.
• How To Control Feelings That Create PTSD Symptoms – ask “What’s another way to look at this?” to interrupt the flow from stimulus to response with symptoms.
• Pediatricians screen parents for ACEs to improve health of babies – parents with ACEs are offered by the pediatricians guidance and resources (they would not have been offered w/o the screening).
• Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) – description of the evidence-based TF-CBT approach including psychoeducation, relaxation, affective modulation skills and conjoint child parent sessions.
• Using the Mnemonic “Three Cs” with Children and Adolescents – Catching, Checking, and Changing can be particularly helpful for clients to learn to identify and evaluate unhelpful and inaccurate thinking in CBT.
• Vet’s Best Friend –  a special program in which veterans work with the abused or abandoned dogs at a shelter with the intent of rehabilitating the dogs for adoption and in the process are also healing.

Technology and Mental Health

• Creating Social Media Policies for the Classroom – the use of a competing values framework to create a policy considering professional ethics, formal policies, institutional culture, student learning, and instructor values.
• Learning New Technology: A Guide – a user-friendly guide for social workers to employ when tackling (or considering) new technology to employ in their work/life.
• Tech, Tech, and More Tech – examples of tech improving/empowering mental/health care such as virtual hope box, mood trackers and improved sharing of data across systems.
• Using Hybrid Learning to Redesign My Course – use of tech to enhance student learning and engagement including: “View One, Create One and Teach One.”

Healthcare

• Joining the dots: mental and physical health – people with mental health conditions can lose 10 or more years of their lives compared to the average person in the population; twitter chat brought up ways to connect between physical and mental health. And while we’re talking about the connection, Childhood physical, sexual abuse linked to ulcerative colitis.
• To Be a Better Social Worker, Practice with Fake Clients – standardized patient affords social workers and other providers a real-time assessment of an actual patient response.
• What We Wish for When We Wish for a Better Health Care Experience – Patients and clinicians are on the same team; clinicians are human beings trying their best, and patients and families are looking for mutual respect and support.

Career/NonProfit

• 4 Questions To Ask Yourself When Hiring a New Therapist – a few key criteria that Dr Julie Hanks suggests you look for in a candidate (beyond simply having required credentials and experience).
• Five Ways to Help Your Nonprofit Learn from Feedback – Listen, Act, Learn. Repeat. Organizations that are committed to learning are the ones that will be more effective at meeting the needs of the people they intend to help.
• Growing Your Practice With Retreats, Workshops and Groups – build the content/theme of your workshops/retreats based upon the similarities and collective issues of clients.
• Guidelines For Psychotherapists Who Have Had Their Intellectual Property Stolen – the information you need to detect if someone has stolen your work and what to do about it.

Self Care

• 5 for 5 Self-Care Challenge: Draw or Paint – 5-minute art prompts for you to try such as Doodling Exercises or Drawing, Painting, Collage, and Sculpture Exercises.
• Six steps to finding balance in busy lives – helpful strategies to avoid burnout and rust-out that result from long term stress; burnout is marked by exhaustion and rust-out by apathy and disengagement.

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