Best in Mental Health (9/12/16 – 9/25/16)

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:

• Advocacy
• Education/Technology
• Therapy/Relationships
• Self-Care
• Healthcare
• NonProfit Career/Private Practice

Advocacy

• Addressing Race –  Charles Lewis – “Social workers need to have a sustained conversation about race… what our profession should be doing to ensure that people of color are treated equally… the color of one’s skin should not constrain one’s ability to realize his or her full potential…”
  • Prep School Negro: Periscope of the discussion on Race, Racism and Leveraging Technology for Social Justice – Pat Shelly and Nancy J. Smyth – “screening of Prep School Negro… After…Mike… director of Prep School Negro and producer, civil rights educator and activist, in a discussion on race, racism… fight for social justice…”
  • Racial Disparities In Wages Boil Down To One Thing: Discrimination – Gene Demby – “weighs down black people’s wages begins before they’re hired and continues long after…”
  • White Power and White Powerlessness: A New Double Consciousness? –  Peter Kaufman – “Poor whites may indeed feel a degree of powerlessness because they increasingly sense that society is leaving them behind… “
• Could You Survive One Month Living in Poverty? – SJS/Youth Today – “Simulation for Youth Workers and Educators… Families in this simulation typify a majority of low-income homes… They’re in survival mode, always trying to make ends meet… system is working against them…”
• Breaking economic barriers for women and girls – Launching Your Daughter interview w/Amy Pender – “parents… make money a non-taboo topic… Teach budgeting and money management skills… Teach about credit and what it means… Educate sons on not penalizing females…”
  • Powered by Girl: Tips For Working in Tandem with Youth – Amy Jussel – “good mental floss for ANYone working alongside youth, not just in the girl sphere… why so many nonprofits and well-meaning public health programs fail miserably… trying to “teach” rather than “reach” youth…”
• HIV/AIDs Prevention & Treatment – #MacroSW twitter chat – check out archive… “More than 1.2 million people in the US are living with HIV, and 1 in 8 of them don’t know it…”
• Media Night 9.29.16 – Environmental Justice – #MacroSW twitter chat – “Dr. Samantha Teixeira… Environmental justice gets at the notion that all people have a right to a clean, safe, environment regardless of their race, ethnicity, SES, gender, and no matter where they live…”
• MovingSocialWork.org Site Serves as Hub on Practice Mobility and License Portability – “Standards and procedures can vary, and almost no professional license can simply be “swapped” for one in a new jurisdiction… Weigh in on the issue…”
• Suicide: What Can Schools and Communities Do About It?  – Therapy Chat podcast interview w/Jonathan Singer – “upstream prevention imagines… is there a phase of her life if we had done something… radically changed her trajectory so she would never have wanted to die?… good behavior game… behavior modification… protected them from suicide… DBT skills in schools…”
• What the Heck Does “Equity” Mean? – Kris Putnam-Walkerly & Elizabeth Russell – “each of us getting what we need to survive or succeed—access to opportunity, networks, resources, and supports—based on where we are and where we want to go…”

Education/Technology

• The Future of Social Work Education – Susan P. Robbins, Nancy J. Smyth et al. – “three important trends… social work education shifting toward more Web-based delivery… shift to a competency-centered, outcomes-based approach to accreditation… simulation holds great promise…”
• How Colleges Should Adapt in a Networked Age – “you are what you are connected to… We are in the midst of a tremendous legitimacy collapse…  big change in this era is the compression of time itself… skill-time compression…”
• Publish, Don’t Perish! Strategies for Getting Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals – Susan P. Robbins et al. – “key metric used to evaluate and promote your professional career… Revise and resubmit is probably the most common response…”
• Putting the You in YouTube: Taking It To The Next Level – Jeff Ream – “Google’s Hangouts On Air feature, which lets you hangout with up to 10 others and broadcast it live online while recording the video automatically, has moved and become embedded into YouTube Live…”
• #SWvirtualpal: Hashtagging for Connection – Laurel Hitchcock – ” digital and social media  present all sorts of possibilities and opportunities… join us… social work pen pals… to create professional connections between social work students, practitioners, and academics across the planet…”
• Technology-Mediated Assignments for Real World Learning – InSocialWork podcast interview w/Karen Zgoda, Dr. Melanie Sage, Dr. Jonathan Singer & Dr. Lauri Goldkind – “increasing push to use these digital tools [in class] but not much direction as to how to do it… Professors… offer examples from their work…”

Therapy/Relationships

• Dream sleep – All in the Mind interview w/ – “During our night’s sleep there are four or five 90-minute cycles. Slow wave or non-REM sleep makes up most of each cycle, REM sleep lasts about 20 minutes in each cycle… REM sleep is vital for memory, at least in the animal model… REM… when most dreaming occurs…”
• Helping Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder when Bullied or Cyberbullied – Sameer Hinduja – “make sure you stay… calm when working with a child who is bullied… Provide reassurance… they didn’t deserve what happened… you are here to help them…”
• How Do We Measure Therapeutic Outcomes? – Chey Heap – “Clients may… value being able to review their progress… indications that the use of outcome measures can improve therapeutic outcomes…”
• How to cope with anger in a productive way – Ilse Sand – “decide into which of four categories your anger falls… 1. wounded self-image, 2. a need to protect yourself, 3. the other person breaching values your values, or 4. a violation of your boundaries…”
• Ideas in Dementia Come at You Like a Runaway Train – George Huba – “current rules of etiquette do not take account of the fact that some of the participants in an interaction will have severe cognitive impairment or mental illness… if a thought is not expressed immediately it will be forgotten…”
• I Found Topless Pictures of My Daughter. What Now? – Dr. Mandi Silverman -“Talk about your family values and expectations… Address what she might see out in the world that may not be in line with your family values and expectations…”
• Moirology – Martha Crawford – “We must mourn everything we cherish, for all things are impermanent… those who have learned how to grieve are the ones who are able to survive, and love, and appreciate… beauty of Life… Mourning allows us to have compassion for ourselves…”
• Name That Diagnosis – SWTP – “A client tells a social worker that her apartment is infested with tiny insects. “They want to change my thoughts,” she reports…”
• The relationship as client – Laurie Meyers – “challenge for couples counselors (and their clients) is to identify how communication went awry — or if it ever truly existed in the first place — and then work to reestablish it…”
• Sex Therapy – Practice of the Practice interview w/Stefani Threadgill – “a large need… with couples, sexless marriages or discrepancies… power to hormonal changes to relationship issues… relationship is left vulnerable if you don’t continue to seduce or flirt…”
• Social Work Ethics in the Real World – Danna Bodenheimer – “Part of our underlying clinical work must be to keep a steady eye on the increasing ways in which oppression traumatizes the psyche… psyches become traumatized when meaning cannot be made of pain… Recognizing and holding this truth is a clinical imperative and ethic…”
• To Get Over a Breakup, Change Your Mindset – Melanie Greenberg Ph.D. – “most people try to make sense of the event by asking: “Why did this happen?” “Was it my fault?”… The way we answer these questions can either help us cope or exacerbate and extend the psychological damage…”
• Transformative Healing – Amelia Franck Meyer – “What if we built a child welfare system that was based on keeping children with those they know and love… What if we found and supported those caregivers to take care of these children and understand their trauma?…”
• Trauma Exposure Linked to PTSD in 911 Dispatchers – Afifa Mahboob – “911 dispatchers are exposed to duty-related trauma… Participants in the study reported experiencing fear, helplessness, and horror in reaction to various calls they received…”
• Unconscious Identification with a Loved One Can Create an Obstacle to Change – Josephine Ferraro – “From the time that we’re infants, we learn to identify with our caregivers, usually our parents… include values, opinions, thoughts, feelings, habits and lifestyle choices…
• What Causes Codependency? – Sharon Martin – “If your parent was incapable of fulfilling the parenting role, you may have taken on the parenting role to fill in the gaps…”

Self-Care

• #40BetterHours: The Art of Single Tasking – Beth Kanter – “tips on new digital literacy skills of managing information overload and overwhelmed… “Batch Concepts” – If you are working on five different stories, don’t jump around… Write a to do list…”
• Can Fitness Bands Lower Anxiety and Improve Mental Health? – Tanya J. Peterson – “Mental health and physical health are intimately intertwined… as I walked more, climbed the stairs more… my anxiety was reduced significantly…”
• A Guided Self-Care Assessment for Helping Professionals – Cedar Barstow [GoodTherapy.org] – “primary question is: What does it take for me to show up for the people I help in a way I feel good about?… Rate yourself in the following areas on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10…”

Healthcare

• Depression After Abortion: Understanding and Coping –  Markus MacGill – “only limited research into the psychological effects of abortion… experience of abortion is different for each woman… higher risk of depression is linked to genetics…”
• For Healthcare Cybersecurity the Whole is Weaker Than the Sum of the Parts – Jesse Walker and Ross Koppel – “all of them can be hacked, and all will eventually be hacked… electronic health records—are worth ten to thirty times more on the black market than are credit card numbers…”
• Invent Health: A jolt of inspiration for health care – Susannah Fox – “Industrial-strength manufacturing tools are becoming cheaper, easier to use, and more widely available… Social media enables inventors to share their ideas with potential users for design feedback, funding, and distribution…”
• Schools And Mental Health: When The Parent Has To Take Charge – NPR – “One in five children suffers in their mental health: anxiety, difficulty focusing and social challenges… many schools don’t have the resources to meet their needs…”
• Side-effects of antipsychotics – John Baker et al. at NPNR Conference – “Antipsychotics have been shown to be effective in treating psychosis, improving symptoms and reducing relapse risk… only a small minority… assess… side effects… side effects are not identified and therefore not managed…”
• Why should you do an elective with Cochrane? – John Cafferkey – “unique insight into an organisation that is hugely influential for clinical practice and health policy worldwide…”

NonProfit Career/Private Practice

• 5 Steps to Smarter Learning – Samara Stone – “Make the choice to learn at the speed of implementation. Learn, then implement, then come back and learn some more… Choose wisely…”
• 5 things you can do right now to improve your SEO and attract more clients online – Kelly Higdon – “Focus on 3 to 6 keyword phrases per page… Optimize your page titles… Naturally integrate keywords into content…”
• 42 Years as a Therapist – Businesses in Bloom interview w/Robert Taibbi – “finding a niche as a therapist and having a clear web presence that emphasizes your strengths and style of work, so clients know what to expect…”
• I Started Before I Was Ready & Here’s What I Learned – Lauren Woodard – “Networking is your marketing budget’s BFF… you cannot beat face to face meetings when building your business… You will make mistakes, and that’s okay…”
• The Many Meanings of Fee Setting – Marie Hartwell-Walker – “Money… indicates attitudes and concerns you have towards money, yourself, your prospective clients and your professional community…”
• Seeds for a Successful Private Practice: 7 Tips for New Grads [own] – 9 professionals… provide you with their best advice… building a network of therapists… each practitioner… valuable information with different nuances… graphic… summary of their key take-aways…”
• Tech Peace of Mind for Therapists Who Care – Roy Huggins and Tamara Suttle – “You need a Business Associate Agreement to be HIPAA compliant… blue host is hosting the website… email address managed by blue host… not HIPAA… you can keep the website on blue host and get instructions from google to set up HIPAA compliant email…”