Best in Mental Health (11/9/2015 – 11/22/2015)

Mental Health Roundup

This contains some of the latest news in social work, healthcare, private practice and more!

This week’s wrap-up has 4 main themes:

• Therapy/The Importance of Relationships
• Healthcare/Mental Health and Technology
• Advocacy/Cultural Sensitivity
• Career/NonProfit

Therapy/The Importance of Relationships

• Challenging The Stereotype Of The Paralyzed Trauma Victim – Review of Jim Rendon’s “Upside” – “Many stories feature men and women whose new post-tragedy goals became giving back to society or “paying forward” the support and care… behind that headline is a long story…”
• Clinicians must turn evidence into practice – Jill Sederstrom – “evidence-based approaches can add value by giving clinicians a framework based on empirical data from many sources when treating patients… National Institute of Mental Health can be a valuable resource…”
• The Father’s Gaze – Joseph Burgo – “Not being seen by your father makes you feel insignificant… Being fully seen, accepted… by your male therapist can be a healing experience for men who didn’t get what they needed from their fathers”
• Hoarding, Mess, and Barry Yourgrau – therapydoc – “Let’s get serious and take a look at the features of Hoarding Disorder to determine what is pathological, what is not… The excuse, one of the many, is that everything might be useful one day… “
• How to Know if Therapy is Working – Judith S. Beck – “when both therapists and clients receive feedback on progress, clients tend to have better outcomes… CBT therapists monitor progress each week…”
• Mastering the graceful dance of technique and relationship in therapy – Lisa Mitchell – “When we are with our clients, we dance… a graceful improvisational dance that bends and stretches between content and process… a therapeutic relationship… connection to inspire change…”
• Meet Your Next Challenge With a Journaling Exercise! – [own] – The writing process in journaling is empowering because you are free to imagine and practice what you want to say or do with others in the safe place of the page… steps for the “Letter of Encouragement” exercise…”
• NASW Adoption Awareness Month, resources for social workers – NASW – “Youth who age out of foster care often lack support and are more prone to experience unhealthy outcomes, including homelessness, poverty… health issues… McRae plans social work career…”
• An Open Letter To The Parents Of College Students – Relando Thompkins – “your “child” has entered college. Take a moment to honor this time in life… need to given the space to make their own decisions… They want you to be proud of them… “
• Putting restorative theory into practice – Belinda Hopkins “moved people from a place of anger, fear, shame and guilt to one of open-heartedness, collaborative problem-solving and celebration… Each practitioner sees the restorative process through their own unique theoretical lens…”
• Which Comes First? Thoughts or Feelings? – Elisabeth Corey – “feelings come first… thoughts come second… The feeling is old. It comes from past trauma. And the thoughts are simply trying to make sense of it… We must feel our emotions to heal..”
• A woodworker’s perspective on the journey of counseling – Peter Allen – “I do my best work in the woodshop when I approach the art with humility, patience and few if any judgments about what I “should” be doing… A person’s beauty and purpose have been there all along… we simply work to clear away…”
• Write with it… – Dima Dupéré – “The world is in a chaotic state… for many, these feelings bring on extra anxiety… Let me propose the ‘dialogue’ writing exercise… you choose 2 different colored pens…”

Healthcare/Mental Health and Technology

• Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration – Kirsten Lawson – “Collaborative care that incorporates brief low intensity psychological therapy, delivered in partnership with practice nurses in primary care, can reduce depression and improve self management of chronic disease in people…”
• Fixing mistakes and replacing outdated content on Wikipedia – Cochrane – Interest in helping but not sure where to start? You can quickly locate outdated Cochrane Reviews… Select from the list of… pages… when a new Cochrane Review exists that can be used instead…”
• #FlipTheClinic and Why it Matters to Social Work – Sean Erreger – ““an open experiment to transform the patient-clinician experience”… challenging healthcare (mental health clinics too) to take on “Flips” to create “actionable” ways of “changing the healthcare encounter”…”
• Do-It-Yourself Health: How the Maker Movement is Innovating Health Care – Anna Young – “we’re working to engage the whole health care community by inviting doctors, nurses, therapists, technologists, caregivers and patients to work together… making health care better…”
• How to Report Live from Nonprofit Events Using Periscope – Heather Mansfield – Promote the stream in advance… link to your Periscope Profile… and Twitter username… Create a hashtag for your stream campaigns… embrace the unexpected…”
• Macro Social Work Practice Ethics #MacroSW – archive of twitter chat with Heather McCabe;  the questions discussed H/T Karen Zgoda.
• Personal Learning Network Twitter Cheat Sheet – [own] “twitter can provide you with a valuable and continuously evolving library of information and ideas on every topic! It will also give you the opportunity to meet experts… from a variety of different fields…”
• #Prezi #demo with @DocForeman on #SPSM – archive of tweets from the 11/22/15 Suicide Prevention Social Media chat.
• Texas Social Media Conference –   a recap of all of the tweets [some resources are included such as: Addy Meira Tolliver’s annotated bibliography and list of possible collaborative applications of technology in classroom; others are “locked”]
• The use and abuse of benzos – Lynne Malcolm – “they are over prescribed… balance control, control over… speech, thinking, many of these important processes can be impaired by benzodiazepine use… mortality rates are different…It’s often [prescribed for] anxiety but… also… insomnia…”

Advocacy/Cultural Sensitivity

• Seven minutes of meditation can reduce racial prejudice, study finds – Science News – “Loving-kindness meditation (LKM), a Buddhist practise that promotes unconditional kindness towards oneself and others, is effective at reducing racial bias…”
• On Being an Advocate for Social Justice When Everyone’s Afraid – Jodi Nelan – Being a social worker means balancing the personal and the professional… speak out against social injustice and to be competent allies both in our professional lives and our personal lives…”
• Casework, Social Justice, and the Information Age (part 2 of 2) – Dr. Virginia Eubanks continues her discussion on social justice in the information age with a question and answer exchange with members of University at Buffalo School of Social Work community.
• The Common Experience of “Math Trauma” – Annie Murphy Paul – “Jo Boaler… professor of education… Mathematics… power to crush students’ spirits, and many adults do not move on… need to teach students about mindset inside mathematics, rather than in general…”
• Improving Protection for Victims of Forced Labour and Human Trafficking – Nils Muižnieks – “Children are often considered as perpetrators of petty crime by law enforcement officials, when they are in fact victims of exploitation by the real criminals…”
• Invisible Isn’t Imaginary – Dr. Ann Becker Schutte – “a majority of the most painful and debilitating illnesses that we face… don’t have any visible signs… People who are struggling… because of pain… do not need to have their struggle questioned… healthy privilege in action…”
• Racial Formation Theory – Michael Omi – ““the socio-historical process of race-making” a process fundamentally based on characterizing people as “other”… Listen to Omi’s BCSSW talk (with Powerpoint slides) in its entirety…”
• When Sexual Assault Victims Don’t “Resist” – Robert T. Muller – “physical struggle is not a defining feature of sexual assault… Some victims may even experience… an involuntary freezing response: difficulty moving and speaking, the inability to escape, and feelings of terror…”

Career/NonProfit

• 5 Traits of the Successful Counseling Private Practitioner – Jennifer Behm – “first consideration in running a successful private practice is to reconcile any dissonance you might feel as you seek to balance altruism and entrepreneurism…”
• More Thoughts on Matterness for Associations – Allison Fine – “Matterness is at the heart of donor and member retention… There are wonderful opportunities to engage board members as your Matureness ambassadors… on demand key principles of matureness webinar“
• Nonprofit Partnerships and the Power of Collaboration – Ellie Grabski – “Strategic partnerships between nonprofit organizations create value to both organizations … operational efficiencies… How could other orgs assist the same people you help in different ways?… on-demand webinar…”
• The #1 Way to Impress Current and Future Clients – Miranda Palmer – “Be Authentic… We need our marketing materials to reflect who we are… What does an authentic phone policy look like? It looks like you not feeling resentful when you get off the phone from a 30 minute crisis call…”
• Pick My Business Brain, Episode 1 – Camille McDaniel reviews three therapist’s websites and one’s profile on Psychology Today.
• Tips for Building an Awesome Website – Kat Love – the top three mistakes clinicians make in creating their Private Practice website… Forgetting to put contact information on every page… Making the website about themselves instead of about the client…”
• Trainer’s Notebook: Group Polling Techniques and Tools and Incorporating Movement – Beth Kanter – “When… adding… polling to a training… ask, how is [it]… helping people learn?… Help the facilitator understand who is in the room… Help participants digest… content shared…”
• Your Social Work Brand: What We Gain and Our Goals for Personal Branding – Kristin Battista-Frazee – “social workers… how they approach branding and what they have gained in the process… using branding to establish relationships and present an authentic self…”
• What are the pros and cons of using a personal name vs a business name for a therapy practice? – Juliet & Clinton – “if you’re a solo practitioner, most people are going to remember you by your personal name, not necessarily by your business name… two caveats…”

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