Best in Mental Health: Increase Your Skills

Therapy and Relationships

• Assertiveness, Differentiation & Self-Care – Julie Hanks & Lauri Mackey – “How to hold up the lantern in difficult conversation… How to get past intense reactions… Ask them what they think, feel, want, and need?…”
• Defining “Commitment” in Your Marriage – Kim Peterson – “recent study by UCLA… marriage will have challenges and difficulties… how we function in a marriage is about choices… the couples chooses how to view an argument… how to respond…”
• Gambling Disorder – Helping Clients Who Practice Risky Behavior – SJS/FSW – “webinar recording… Why and how to screen clients for gambling problems… Risk factors… interventions…”
• The Inevitable Welling Up and The Fidget Spinner – therapydoc – “Sometimes you know perfectly well you are about to step into a landmine… when triggered… Drop it something handy and spend a few seconds retrieving it, collecting yourself…”
• The importance of positive communication for older adults – Robin Dynes – “older adults who maintain their communication skills and continue to interact socially maintain a more positive view about themselves and are more adept at facing… challenges…”
• On Losing a Pet – Trauma and Attachment Report – “short video… unique grief that follows the death of a pet… theories as to why the pain is so strong and enduring…”
• The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name – Keely Kolmes – “Nobody adequately prepared me for the sense of closeness and care that I experience when sitting with a patient…”
• Overcoming Anxiety and Depression On The Autism Spectrum – Prosper with Aspergers interview w/Lee Wilkenson – “cognitive behavior therapy… helpful for reducing anxiety and depression… How anxiety presents differently for autistics versus non-autistics…”
• PTSD and the Relationship between Dishonored trust and Self-doubt – Roland Bal – “trauma that happens to you at a young age will impact… setting healthy boundaries… ability to open up and be vulnerable…”
• Reflection exploratory intervention – Kristina Sargent – “Ask client to paint “what is truly under the reflection”… chance to talk about true intentions despite outward defenses and appearances we may put on for others…”
• Working with Latina/os in counseling – Jacqueline Michelle Barthelemy – “family comes first (after God)… Elders are highly regarded… Most families live in multigenerational households… counseling is stigmatized…”
  • Latino fathers and parenting: lessons learned – Cristina Mogro-Wilson – “Puerto Rican fathers shared that they have a strong commitment to being a role model and father… expected respect… but they also respected their child…”
• What is a Codependent Friendship? – Sharon Martin – “Codependent friendships start out feeling great… friendship feels exhausting… hard to share your own feelings…”

Parenting

• Am I Helping or Enabling my Young Adult Child? – Neil Brown – “The issues and problems that your young adult has belongs to them, not to us… If they are living at home with you, then they need to be positive and productive members of the household

• The Birds and the Bees Talk 2.0: My Daughter Swiped My Toy – Your Teen Magazine – “look at her taking your toys much in the same way as you might have taken a book on sex from your parents’ book shelves…”
• Connecting with baby – All in the Mind podcast w/Jonathan Delafield-Butt – “babies are not born as passive ‘blank canvasses’… infant is already talking to the mother from birth… wanting to engage in a language of the body and feeling and intention”
• Negative Thinking and Anger and Kids – Wendy Young – “we need to be able to demonstrate good anger management skills ourselves… give kids tangible skills… have them describe the size of their anger… Talk about how you can shrink it down to a smaller size…”
• Raising Confident and Creative Kids – The Family Couch interview w/Nick Pavlidis – “By allowing your children to take the lead and serve as the “teacher” to the whole family (or even just the other child)… child time to shine and showcase their skills and build confidence…”
• Resilience: A skill your child really needs to learn (and what you can do to help) – Claire McCarthy – “four factors… supportive adult-child relationships… sense of self-efficacy and perceived control… “

Advocacy

• Don’t want to be a Dream Hoarder? 5 things you can do right now – Richard V. Reeves – “support policies at the national level that will leave you slightly worse off but help to redistribute opportunity…”
• How to use technology to make social projects more impactful – Anna Kwiatkiewicz-Mory & Katarzyna Zwolak-Szwechowicz – “technology can help to trace down corruption using a ‘red flag’ project…”
• Interrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline – InSocialWork podcast interview w/Drs. Gadling-Cole and McElderry – “Development School Partnership… wraparound services to students… strong support systems for… students at risk of not completing their education…”
• Revised Matterness Chapter (Free Download) – Allison Fine – “Focusing on Matterness creates an organizational culture that embraces smart risks, engages in constructive conversations with people inside and outside…”

Healthcare

• Anecdotes are unreliable evidence – John Castle – “If we perform tests on a single person we cannot be certain that the effects of the treatment in that person were not dependent upon the chance variation in their individual body…”
• Ending Homelessness, One Person at a Time – Maggie Willis – “Focusing on “who” rather than “how many” has led us to rethink our city’s overall social services safety net which provides short- and long-term housing, reaches out to people on the streets, and offers employment, health and substance abuse services…”
• The mere presence of your smartphone reduces brain power – “as the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases…”
• Video games can change your brain – “change the brain regions responsible for attention and visuospatial skills and make them more efficient…”
• Who Wins, Who Loses With Senate Health Care Bill – NPR – “allows parents keep their children on their policies until age 26… waivers would allow state to drop benefits… such as maternity coverage, mental health care and prescription drug coverage…”
  • At Nursing Homes, Medicaid Cuts Would Reach Even the Upper Middle Class – NYT – “64 percent of the Americans in nursing homes dependent on Medicaid… People are simply outliving their relatives and their resources…”

Social Work, Technology & Education

• Activities for Building Cultural Competencies – Melissa Gomez – “Be a brave yet humble ex… Provide students the opportunity to investigate their own biases and/or cultural experiences…”
• Addiction Recovery Apps You – Jami DeLoe/HealthyPlace – “Sober Grid… social media with recovery support thrown in… Quit That!… tracks your progress of quitting anything… amount of money you are saving by not partaking in whatever your addiction is…”
• Black Disabled Woman Syllabus – Vilissa Thompson/Relando Thompkins-Jones – “books, essays/articles, speeches, music… diverse forms of Blackness that exists for Black women, and how the lives of Black disabled women meshed within that discourse…
• Can you publish and still perish? – Catherine Cetnik – “Today, you can still publish and perish because there is now so much more published work… impact addresses the ‘so what?’ question… think beyond citations…”
• Can your mobile help you manage your anxiety? – Andres Fonseca – “promising and efficacious method for managing anxiety… engagement… key factor for efficacy…”
• Empowered to Unplug – Josie Ahlquist – “Once students unplugged, they began to look at the world a little differently… realizing how everyone around them was literally looking down… Students began to explore the world around them without technology… Students need resources for their downtime…”
• Livestreamed Suicide on Social Media — The Trauma of Viewership – Social Work Today – Jonathan Singer… “livestreaming… creates a situation where it becomes very easy to promote unsafe messaging around suicides… Nancy Smyth… watching a livestreamed suicide could traumatize the viewer…”
• “NASW, ASWB, CSWE, & CSWA Technology Standards for Social Work – “address social workers’ use of electronic technology to (1) provide information to the public; (2) design and deliver services; (3) gather, manage, store, and access information about clients; and (4) educate and supervise social workers…”
• Safe Schools Initiative – Assessing Threats of Extremist Violence – Emily Hammer/SocialWorkSynergy – “Any student can be enticed into various extremist practices, regardless of race, class, ethnicity, gender identity, etc…”
• Social media and self-representation in health and medical domains – Deborah Lupton – “as part of self-representation, people may also seek to use their social media forums to resist health promotion messages…”
• Supporting the success of online students who are deaf – Laurel Hitchcock -“lessons presented at #SWDE2017… Matthea Marquart… Beth Counselman-Carpenter… YouTube videos are NOT equal access compliant, as they are often inaccurate or their timing is off…”