Best in Mental Health (4/30/16 – 5/15/16)

Mental Health Roundup

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

This week’s wrap-up has 6 main themes:

• Self-Care
• Healthcare
• Relationships
• Therapy
• Advocacy
• Career/Non-Profit/Private Practice

Self-Care

• 8 Keys to Mental Health Through Exercise – Sharon Martin – “full of reflection questions, writing prompts, and action items… Dr. Hibbert explains, with research to back it up, why exercise is such an important piece of mental health care…”
• 15 Ways to Break Up with Your Body Image Issues – Emily Roberts – “How have I shown my body respect today (drinking water, taking the stairs, positive self-talk)? Today I am grateful for these abilities…”
• Awe: For Altruism and Health?  – Dacher Keltner – “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world… Momentary experiences of awe stimulate wonder and curiosity…”
• Building resilient social workers is everybody’s business – Jim Greer – “While there is cause for optimism about the benefits of practices such as mindfulness for social workers, it is important to recognise that this will not solve problems such as unfeasibly large caseloads…”
• Ergonomics for Clinicians – Selling The Couch podcast interview with Cath Cleveland – “Be aware of your posture! Signs of poor posture include headaches, muscular neck pain, and lower back pain…”

Healthcare

• Identity Matters, But Labels Only Go So Far – Sarah King – “significant health disparities related to substance use for non-straight, non-gender conforming individuals… ask questions: “What pronoun do you use?”… “What gender and what sexuality do you identify with?””
• The mysterious corpus callous – All in the Mind podcast interview with Abbie Kinniburgh and Linda Richards… corpus callosum links one side of our brain to the other… missing or malformed… cause quite mild to extreme disabilities… research… brain plasticity “
• Twitter and health – Deborah Lupton – “Healthcare Hashtag Project… Symplur… over 10,000 hashtags… almost 4,000 contributors… digital health discussions…  dominated by commercial and entrepreneurial interests rather than by the experiences of doctors or patients…”
• A Unified Model of Depression – Aaron T. Beck and Keith Bredemeier – “depression can be viewed as an adaptation to conserve energy after the perceived loss of an investment in a vital resource such as a relationship, group identity, or personal asset…”
• Web-based guided self-help can prevent or delay major depression –  Ioana Cristea – “six 30-minute sessions… content… a combination of psychoeducation, behaviour therapy and problem-solving therapy… reduced the incidence of major depressive disorder…”

Relationships

• Are Your Boundaries Being Crossed? – Margarita Tartakovsky’s interview with Julie Hanks… When someone crosses your boundary… confront the person. Maybe they misunderstood you initially… speaking up strengthens relationships in the long run…”
• How social media can support #ConnectedCare – Shirley Ayres – “Care and support… requires much more connected thinking… We all have something to share and we can learn from each other… @MindOfMyOwnApp … children and young people… express their needs…”
• The loss of a meaningful relationship – Kristin Schofield – “narrative approach to terminating therapy… counselor writes a letter to the client… client’s strengths and the counselor’s hopes for the client’s future…”
• Parent Shaming – Family Confidential podcast interview with Mercedes Samudio – “a snapshot of a situation doesn’t… tell the whole story.. Rushing to judgment doesn’t help child or parent… come in with curiosity… How are you doing? What do you need?… “
• The Power of Honesty in Couples Therapy – Terry Real – “hold a mirror up to our clients to help them see themselves and their role in the dysfunctional dance of their relationship… show them the difficult truths… in a way that… we’re actually rooting for them…”
• Preschoolers can teach us what we need to remember about therapy – Lisa Mitchell – “When we turn therapy into a thing, we forget to put the relationship as primary and we focus way too hard on getting the technique or diagnosis correct…”
• Should You Give Your Kid Snapchat or Instagram? – Sameer Hinduja – “If your child has a phone, it’s likely that they really want to be on Snapchat or Instagram… And if… choice… Snapchat…It’s for messaging between individual friends…”

Therapy Tools

• 2 Innovative therapies that involve patients and their therapists working together collaboratively to prevent suicide – Jenny Chen – “Much of what was done in the name of clinical suicide prevention was actually coercive, shaming and controlling…”
• Learning to Manage Emotions Boosts Children’s Well-being – Robert T. Muller – “RULER… More and more schools… teaching students—and teachers—to ‘Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate’ emotions…”
• Magpie – collect data and communicate outcomes – Sean Erreger – “mobile data collection holds a lot of potential for mental health and child welfare… give your teams the opportunity to collect data in real time…”
• Preventing Bullying Through Science, Policy, and Practice – “low rate of observed defending indicates that bystanders coming to the aid of targets of bullying are relatively rare… Teachers and school staff… influential position to address bullying situations…”
• Spin the wheel of coping skills!  – Kristina Marcelli demonstrates the creative use of two paper plates to create a tool to help children remember safe and appropriate ways to cope and express themselves.
• Transgender Issues: A Guide for Therapists Working with Clients in Transition –  Edie Weinstein – “Create a warm, inviting respectful environment… Determine if the individual has a preferred name and pronoun… Avoid making assumptions…”
• TWAP033: The Nine Degrees of Autism – podcast interview with Philip Wylie – “positive mental wellbeing… the model recognizes a person’s gifts and values to society, versus the medical model, which only focuses on impairments and deficits… systematic, linear map of development…”
• What to Do During Your First Days with a New Client – Nicole Clark – “part of the on-boarding process… around program design and evaluation work… make the effort of familiarizing yourself with the uniqueness of the program and the organization…”

Advocacy

• 5 Simple Steps to Reading Policy Research – Holly Yettick – “Filter…Peer review is like a seat belt—it won’t save you every time but it will reduce the odds of injury… focus on research reviews… ask about applicability…”
• Being Anti-Racist – Lyneisha R. Dukes – “Working with R.A.C.E. has provided me the opportunity to be a part of change… Students have been experiencing racism in various forms… how to address it…”
• Black Disabled Woman Syllabus: A Compilation – Vilissa Thompson – “a “living” document… Use the hashtag #BDWSyllabus on social media to share your recs… Ain’t I a Woman by bell hooks… Have Cane, Will Strut: Black Disabled Woman by Heather Watkins…”
• CSWE Candidate Responses – Rachel L. West – “CSWE 2016 elections are now open. ACOSA is sharing the candidate response statements… take these… into consideration before casting your ballot…”
• Édouard Tétreau Shares His Vision for Ethical Finance – “we conduct courses in ethics, and we conduct courses in finance, but these disciplines are very much siloed. They need to be taught in concert with each other…”
• Grand Challenges – Social Isolation on 5/12/16 – Laurel Hitchcock, @AASWSWorg and #MacroSW held a chat – catch up with archive – “Social Isolation affects elderly & youth & risks include maltreatment, mental health issues, suicide & poor health…”
• Human Rights Campaign Outreach to Child Welfare Workers – the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s All Children – All Families project is asking for the participation of child welfare agency staff in its survey.
• I’ll Never Be Here for The N-Word in Any of Its Forms – Relando Thompkins-Jones – “Words have power, and can change meaning over time… I can still hear, see it, and feel it in the ways white supremacy continues to be reinforced through structural racism…”
• Is Being a Transgender Child Traumatic? – Ricky Greenwald – “Socially transitioned transgender children who are supported in their gender identity have developmentally normative levels of depression and only minimal elevations in anxiety…”
• Latino Social Workers Face Challenges and Opportunities – Charles E. Lewis Jr. – “Many Latinos must deal with an unwelcoming and sometimes menacing system of immigration laws and regulations that threatened to break up families. Children born in the United States are citizens but often their parents are not…”
• LGBT Discrimination on Campus and Heterosexual Bystanders– InSocialWork podcast interview with Dr. Adrienne Dessel, Dr. Michael Woodford, and Kevin Goodman about what skills and attitudes are needed to encourage supportive heterosexual bystander involvement and inclusive environments for LGBT individuals.
• Mental Health Matters: Consequences of Mental Health Stigma – “stigma often surrounds those experiencing mental health issues or symptoms… improve the situation by becoming better educated and aware… “

Career/Non-Profit/Private Practice

• 8 Week Mini Bootcamp – Miranda Palmer – “free Business Planning… How to Set Fees… Developing Your Niche… Marketing 101… starting June 3…”
• 16 Must-Know Stats About Online Fundraising and Social Media – “Millennials most inspired to give by social media. Gen X and Baby Boomers by email. Prediction: Gen Z will prefer mobile apps… 18% of all online donations come from mobile device users…”
• How To Engage Your Supporters with Social Listening – Roz Lemieux – guide… what to listen for, as well as tips on engaging the users…”
• Negotiating Salary, Negotiating Worth – Danna Bodenheimer – “When you get an offer, you must counter it with the actual number you have determined that you need to live on… Asking for more is the only way forward…”
• A Personal Brand is Not Just for Rock Stars but Social Workers Too – Kristin Battista-Frazer and #MacroSW held a chat to explore the importance a personal brand has in one’s career; catch up with resources shared and chat archive. Relando Thompkins-Jones highlights a few of the resources Personal Branding Tools for Social Workers
• Private Practice Marketing – Ask Juliet and Clinton – discusses… How can you write a blog when you are not a good writer?… How much should I spend on setting up my office?… Is Pinterest a good place to market a business?…”
• School Counselor Interviews – Overcome Your Anxiety – Jeff Ream describes in detail the typical interviewing process is (thereby explaining why it make take time until you hear back etc.).
• What’s Coming and What’s Here in Online Therapy – a free-to-see, pay-for-CE webinar on June 3 at 12PM EST with Jay Ostrowski and Roy Huggins… emerging developments in technology and education…”
• What grad students can do to launch their careers – Thomas J. Olsen interview of Joe Sanok… as you write papers, think about how you can reuse that content in future blog posts… build social media… network…”

Like this post? Please share it!