Best in Mental Health: Exercise Your Brain!

Mental Health Roundup 11/13/17 – 12/10/17

This contains some of the latest news in social work, healthcare, private practice and more! It may assist you in providing more effective therapy, working with your trans and nonbinary clients, improving health equity, addressing grief during the holidays, naming your private practice and more.

This wrap-up’s main themes are:

• Therapy and Relationships
• Healthcare
• Advocacy
• Self Care/Inspiration
• Social Work, Technology & Education
• NonProfit Career & Private Practice

Therapy and Relationships

• The 3 Stage Journey from Childhood to Adulthood – Neil Brown – “early adolescence, late adolescence and young adulthood… Each stage has its own developmental tasks…”
  • College Readiness: 5 Buckets of Life Skills To Learn Right Now  – Jen Proe/Your Teen Magazine – “independence, reliance, and emotional intelligence…Simple Life Tasks… Managing Their Money… Their Safety…”
  • A comic book story to get teenagers talking about sexual consent – “invites them to debate what’s OK and what’s not OK and encourages them to consider other issues surrounding sexual consent, such as toxic masculinity, pornography and sexting…”
  • Digital Dating Abuse Among Adolescents – InSocialWork podcast interview w/Dr. Lauren Reed – “why females are differentially impacted by this form of dating violence… effective prevention strategies…”
  • Fathers, Sons, & Intimacy – Hilary Jacobs Hendel – “All people have the ability to grow their capacity for intimacy…Expect and welcome the (temporary) discomfort that comes with doing something different…”
  • Hold The Phone: 8 Signs Your Kid Isn’t Ready For a Phone – Devorah Heitner – “If you’re not ready to be the parent of a child with a phone, this matters more than any other reason. Mentorship is crucial…”
  • Kids with Anxiety: Can We Blame the Culture? – Lynn Lyons – “you ARE the culture…Both in those early years and even as they grow into teens and adults, our children don’t exist in some other milieu that is separate from us…”
  •  Mindful Parenting Moment for Challenging Times – Wendy Young – “two minute video… we all need help and, sometimes, a little reminder that we need to step away and take really good care of ourselves, so we can take the best care of our children…”
• Becoming Yourself in Life and in Therapy: What Yalom Teaches Us Once Again –  Lisa Mitchell – “Go back through your life and find the thread that lead you to be who you are…”
  • Connecting With Your True Self – Therapy Chat interview w/Kyle Davies – “our emotion is bubbling up from inside… feedback mechanism which my body is sending me as a result of my interaction with my environment… inviting us to align… true self…”
• All the Cassandras – What a Shrink Thinks – “A canary in a coalmine. A Cassandra… of all the varied experiences of sexual violation that I have experienced in my lifetime, from age 12 on… from the merely icky to psychologically traumatic: there were none that I could stop, even when I saw them coming…”
• Dark Truths of Successful Relationships – Women-in-Depth interview w/Jake Thiessen – “change occurs most efficiently in the context of an intimate relationship where we have an opportunity to feel accepted just as we are…”
  • Mindful Sex: Pleasure, Power, Permission – Practice of Being Seen interview w/Cyndi Darnell – “benefits and limitations to applying mindfulness principles to somatic exploration, and ways that tantra can pick up where mindfulness leaves off…”
  • The Paradox of Child-Centered Marriages – Family Couch interview w/Jackie Flynn – “if we focus on the children so much that we neglect the couple relationship, no one benefits…”
• Flash! Trauma therapy just got easier and faster – Trauma Institute – “Flash… used as a brief precursor to standard EMDR or PC… after just a handful of Flash repetitions, there’s often not much left in the way of memory-associated distress…”
• A Life Path Exercise – Kelly Mitchell/SJS – “depicting your path in life up to the present moment in time… Each person begins by putting a dot on the page and labels that dot with the location of their birth…”
• The Personal is Political – Cathy Hanville – “these issues are affecting people’s well being… it is my duty as a person’s therapist to support them as they navigate their pain and anger about what is going on…”
• Why we deny the science – All in the mind – “Science is a system of enquiry. Science without questions is not science. The science is never settled on anything…”

Healthcare

• Chatbot therapist: can we mimic therapy support with a conversational agent? – Andres Fonseca – “empathic responses based on the user’s mood… valued… weekly summary… prompts… When users become aware that they are talking to a machine… turn them off...”
• Digital inclusion: mental health technologies for people with learning disabilities – Leen Vereenooghe – “main barriers… grouped into three categories: use and interface, organisation and support, and financial…”
• Health, Equity and the Narrative of Place – NAM -“Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is working to counterbalance the veneration of the Confederacy with the erection of public monuments recognizing the racial terror lynchings that claimed the lives…”
• Zero Suicide Alliance: free suicide prevention training for all #ZSALaunch – Andre Tomlin – “free course… enable people to identify when someone is presenting with suicidal thoughts/ behaviour…”
• Strengthening Health Care Systems – AASWSW – “Initiatives to address social determinants of health must be defined broadly enough to incorporate the full range of social, economic, and environmental forces shaping health…”

Advocacy

• Black women are earning more college degrees, but that alone won’t close race gaps – “Educated black husbands are key to racial equity…”
• Communicating research and change-making – Thomas Fudge – “relate to experiences or scenarios the audience can relate to as non-experts in the field… help them see where the research could go…”
• Indigenous Communities, Human Rights and Environmental (In)Justice – Meschelle Linjean/UBSSW SocialWorkSynergy – “oil and gas extraction, mining, logging in Indigenous homelands… often result in displacement, poisoning and desecration of the land and water…”
• #MacroSW: Social Action Series – Rachel L. West -“new series of twitter chats Thurs at 9PM EST… “examine what social action is, its role in social work… social action planning… tactics…”
• Maximizing Social Work’s Policy Impact In A Changing Political Landscape – Kim Simpson/SWPI – “Policy Practice Summit… hosted by the NASW… full report… listing of resources… graphic recording…”
• #MeToo…Even Therapists are Impacted by Trauma – Juliet Kuehnle/Shrink Tank – “reckoning of these revelations of horrible offenses with people we respected and admired ignites confusion and sensitivity which can manifest as the inner turmoil and vulnerability…”
• One Year Later: Trump policies negatively impact social work – Alison Laurio/NASW – “access to affordable health care… climate change issues… immigration and Dreamers…”
• Substance Abuse Stigma: An Obstacle in Addiction Recovery – Misti Kuykendall /HealthyPlace – “Externally… several places substance abuse stigma can be seen… Recovering people stigmatize each other…”
• “Ways to Be Less Oppressive to Trans and/or Nonbinary People*” – CJ Venable/N.A.H. – “You cannot tell a person’s gender just by looking at them… Similarly, you can’t tell a person’s pronouns from their appearance OR their gender…”
• White Americans Are Still Confused About Racism – Jon Greenberg – “Black preschoolers are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than White preschoolers… Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as White Americans – a statistic that was true back in 1954…“
• Why DACA? Why Now? (part 2 of 2) – InSocialWork interview w/Deb Ortega & Ashley Hanna – “narratives commonly associated with DACA recipients and immigrants, arguing that these narratives need to be reconstructed…”
• Workplace Sexual Harassment Is a Public Health Issue – Erika Sabbath/bcsocialwork – “Those who experience sexual harassment at work often experience depression, anxiety, and unhealthy coping behaviors like excessive drinking…”

Self Care/Inspiration

• Coping with a Personal Crisis While Running a Private Practice – Sharon Martin – “Ask for help. Now is not the time to try to do it all yourself…. Don’t take on anything new…”
• Diving Deep in Your Art Journaling Practice – Amy Johnson Maricle – “ability to transform my feelings on the page, especially by working in stages and layers…”
• A Guide to Grief During the Holidays – Tami Micsky/New Social Worker – “help people by encouraging them to consider the things that are within their control and make decisions based on this concept…”
• Womens Money Stories – Nicole Burgess -“money stories can keep you afraid of earning more, asking for a higher salary, or being in alignment with your values…”

Social Work, Technology and Education

• Educators’ Perspectives on the NASW Technology Standards for Social Work Education and Supervision –  Laurel Hitchcock – “twenty-five people… their best practice and research wisdom…”
• Evaluating social work supervision – socialworknz – “majority of the social work participants reported that they evaluated supervision in some form… reports of unsatisfactory and harmful supervision…”
• Non-traditional Students Require Non-traditional Policies for Field Placements – Danny Carroll/SWH – “While there have been major leaps forward in distance learning and online education, there has been little to no innovation regarding CSWE accreditation policies…”
• Prof2Prof – Stuck on Social Work – “platform where those in academia can share their work and find much needed resources…”
• Research Briefs for School Social Workers – SSWN – “Most cultural brokers attempted to socialize families into dominant school-centric norms and agendas but rarely addressed power dynamics between families and schools or leveraged opportunities for schools to learn from families…”‘
• Trans* Studies in Higher Education Syllabus – Dr. Z Nicolazzo/N.A.H. – “broken up into a series of weekly reading lists…  syllabus will shift and change over time, as it should…”

NonProfit Career & Private Practice

• Book Review: Engine of Impact – Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector – Beth Kanter – “Scale Jail: Nonprofits that do not have a well-built engine and have little or no fuel…”
• Documenting Criminal Activity: Yes or No? – QA Prep – “The short answer is YES. However, there are things to consider when documenting your client’s criminal history…”
• Does journalism’s past hold clues to nonprofits’ futures? – “The last fifteen years have been hard on journalism. Revenue models have been upended…”
• From Agency to Private Practice – How Private Practice Saved My Career – Leo/Abundance Practice-Building – “Most of my professional life had been built around my experiences in community mental health agencies… chronic late nights, low pay requiring multiple jobs to make ends meet…”
• How To Name a Private Practice – Joe Sanok – “don’t use your own name… use the term ‘counseling’, ‘therapy’, ‘psychotherapy’, ‘psychology’… don’t be boring…”
•  Integrating testing in your Private Practice – Private Practice Experts w/Jeremy Sharp – “Testing is a valuable part of mental health services and we need more of it in the private sector…”
• 5 Lessons I’ve Learned From Successful Private Practitoners – Selling the Couch – “Successful private practitioners guard their time… take an abundance mindset…”
• The Low Down on BAAs – Katie Malinski – “Business Associate Agreement, is a contract between covered entities (who are regulated by HIPAA because of their contact with PHI) and the various providers who may serve them…”
• Patient Gifts in Psychotherapy: A Guide for Therapists – Marie Hartwell-Walker/PsychCentral – “Accepting or rejecting a gift should be about the patient’s needs, not ours…”
• Speaking Out When Our Values Are in Play – SSIR – “Social sector organizations cannot hide behind silence when so many of the values they stand for are being politicized…”

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