Best in Mental Health (10/28/18 – 11/25/18)

Mental Health Roundup 10/28/18 – 11/25/18

This roundup contains some of the latest news in social work, healthcare, private practice and more! It may assist you in better understanding asexuality, addressing anxiety, social media for social work educators, overeating, practicing across state lines, avoiding compassion fatigue 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

• 50 Shades of Attraction: Understanding the Asexual Spectrum – Zawn Villines/GoodTherapy – “both sexuality and romantic feelings exist on a continuum… Asexuals may experience romantic attraction but little or no sexual desire. Or they may experience neither romantic or sexual attraction…”
• Analysis Paralysis: Making Good Decisions with Anxiety – Robert Hammel – “take the expectation off that you have to make the right decision every time. What decision would you make if you knew there wasn’t actually a wrong one?…”
• The extremes of love – All in the Mind w/Dr Frank Tallis – “the way we deal with love as a culture, we tend to belittle it in terms of romantic comedy… conditions of longing and desire are very, very difficult to treat…”
• Imaginal Dress Rehearsal – Francine Broder/Beck Institute – “Core belief: I’m helpless… patient practiced prosocial behavior in which he could imagine acting and feeling strong instead of weak and helpless…”
• Mothers, Daughters, Myth & Moon: Rituals to Honor a Girl’s Coming-of-Age – Women-in-Depth w/Janet Lucy and Terri Allison – “moon as our divine mother and every woman as our sister… goddess myths… ancient archetypes that we could reference… for… every quality…”
• Moving through trauma – Jessica Smith/Counseling Today – “most counselors are wounded healers… Yoga helped me come back to my body and feel safe in my body again…”
• Teaching Our Kids Gratitude: A Simple Way to Keep a Family Journal – Mattie Barron/Educate Empower Kids – “as you and your kids express gratitude, the more grateful each of you will become…”
• Understanding Polyvagal Theory – Therapy Chat w/Deb Dana – “Through a polyvagal lens… actions are automatic and adaptive… moving in patterns of protection… door opens to compassion…”
• What does it take to be a really good listener? – Robert Mundle/JKP –“unhurried calmness and for as long as people felt they needed to talk… Not knowing what to do with the pain we experience can lead to feeling overwhelmed and burnt out…”
• What Works in Psychotherapy? Valuing “What Works” rather than Working with What We Value – Scott Miller – “focus… on… Improving your ability to respond emphatically… Routinely and formally assessing the quality of the therapeutic relationship…”
• Why do I still overeat? – Michelle May – “overeating IS part of normal eating… cultivate curiosity… When did I get the urge to eat? What physical sensations did I have? What was I thinking? What was I feeling? What else was going on?…”
• Why You Want To Know About Activities of Daily Living – Stephen Borgman – “it’s the small things that make the biggest difference… You can’t improve on what you don’t know…

Healthcare

• The 5 Lies of Suicide – Christine Hammond/Psych Central – “Lie 1: She will only be briefly missed… Lie 2: Life will be easier for others when she was gone… Lie 3: Her mistakes were too great to be forgiven…”
• Facts, Conclusions, and More Questions on the Road to Solving Disparities – Scott Cook – “Health system leaders and payers are key to changing how vulnerable groups are cared for… Providers are motivated to reduce disparities, once they find out they exist…”
• How the Future of Work May Impact Our Well-Being – Paul Tarini – “work—its schedules, demands, benefits, and pay—all formally and informally shape our opportunities to be healthy…”
• Sense of coherence and mental health of caregivers: a systematic review and meta-analysis – Martin Webber/National Elf – “Sense of coherence (SOC) strengthening interventions may reduce the risk of emergence of depression and anxiety symptoms in carers and protect their well being”
• When Will We Solve Mental Illness? – Benedict Carey – “biological psychiatry has given doctors and patients little of practical value, never mind a cause or a cure… Depression is not one ailment but many, expressing different faces in different people…”

Advocacy

• Edward Snowden Explains Blockchain to His Lawyer — and the Rest of Us – ACLU – “any time a system lets somebody change the history with a keystroke, you have no choice but to trust a huge number of people to be both perfectly good and competent, and humanity doesn’t have a great track record of that. Blockchains are an effort to create a history that can’t be manipulated…”
• Latinx Use of Traditional Health Care: The Social Network Effect – NASW – “respondents who believed in spiritual healing… and came from a household that used curanderxs… more likely to seek the help of curanderxs when in need of health care…”
• Narrative Assessment: bringing out the story of your advocacy – Hivos – “Narrative assessment builds on Theory of Change thinking and story-telling… what advocates really do, the challenges they face and address, and the meaning of their achievements…”
• Strategies for Confronting Epidemics of Fear and Hunger – CUFPI – “new kind of fear… product of current administration… Immigrants eligible for SNAP, Medicaid and other benefits may decline assistance or disenroll… some already have…”
• What kind of “Social Justice” are you talking about? – Sam Killermann – “retributive social justice… eye-for-an-eye… restorative social justice, where the wronged and wrong-doers come together in conversation to establish a remedial path forward…”

Self-Care/Inspiration

• Art Journaling When You Feel Sad – Amy Johnson Maricle – “focus on art process over product… layer… Journal About Why You Feel Sad… Paint Your Feelings… Transform Your Feelings…”
• Be Present with this Victory Visualization for Anxiety – Morgan Meredith/HealthyPlace – “first step of the visualization is to stop all activity. Sit or lie somewhere comfortable with your hands in your lap or over your belly…”
• Caring And Compassion Fatigue – Practice of the Practice w/Jennie Lannette Bedsworth – “Seek support – from family, friends, and/or peers… Find training in evidence-based practices for your field, so you can be the most effective with your time, and experience results…”
• How to balance self care with running a business – Get Down To Business Consulting – “Stay off of social media during the day if current events are contributing to your stress level…”
• Self-Care A-Z: Relax, Reset, Rediscover! – Donia Addison/New Social Worker – “take time to discover our likes and dislikes at different life stages and adapt our self-care practice…”

Social Work, Technology & Education

• #APM18 Teaching with Technology using the SAMR Model –  Jonathan Singer, Melanie Sage & Nancy J. Smyth, Laurel Hitchcock – “ways to substitute, augment, modify or redefine existing learning strategies and assignments with technology-mediated learning strategies and assignments…”
• Technology Assessment Checklist for SW Practice – SocialWorkPad/Teaching & Learning in Social Work – “Number of hours spent engaged with technology each day… How does tech affect mood?… Has technology created any benefits/problems for you?…”
• Council on Social Work Education #APM18 – JimmySW – “how Schools of Social Work use Twitter… pivotal role in helping students become lifelong learners, increase their digital literacies…”
• Free Online Money Support Groups for Women in December – Center for Financial Social Work – “The free sessions are scheduled during the first three Tuesdays of December…”
• Identity Development of LGBTQ+ Youth – inSocialWork podcast w/Dr Lauren McInroy – “how online fandom can foster resilience, heighten well-being, and help LGBTQ+ youth navigate challenges…”
• Job Search Tactics for Macro Social Workers – Rachel L. West… host #MacroSW Lunch & Learn… 11/27/18… What are your favorite job boards for macro jobs?….”
• NLP, Social Media, and Me – StuckonSW – “Machines are able to analyze text and calculate [suicide] risk… The challenge lies in how one collects, mines, and follows up with the data…”
• Second Edition of the Social Media Toolkit for Social Work Field Educators – Laurel Hitchcock – “toolkit… tools and resources to help social work students and field instructors assess, develop, and maintain an online identity for professional purposes…”
• The Skinny on Screen Time: Common Sense Over Research (at least for now) – Cyberbullying Research Center – “we still don’t know much about the consequences of screen time (on the positive or negative side)… What’s more important is the quality of kids’ media, how it fits into your family’s lifestyle, and how you engage your kids with it.””
• Street Art, Researching Men & Boys, and Social Determinants of Health –  Social Work Discoveries w/Dr Neil Hall – “as a whole, the male gender occupies a more privileged space in society… within that… some groups of men are in a marginalized sector…”
• Teaching in the open: How I published a free textbook – Matthew DeCarlo/Teaching & Learning in Social Work – “OER provides the institutional framework needed for faculty to teach in the open—sharing resources, building off one another’s work… improving how social work is taught…”
• Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Social Work Practice – Dustin MacDonald/SWH – “training or learning activities… Clinical supervision is one opportunity to engage in deliberate practice…”

Nonprofit Career and Private Practice

• AI for Nonprofits and Social Good: Link Roundup – Beth Kanter – “Facebook Increasingly Reliant on A.I. To Predict Suicide Risk… 4 Human-Caused Biases We Need to Fix for Machine Learning…”
• Everything You Wanted To Know About Billing and Insurance – Abundance Practice-Building w/Jeremy Zug – “there are three big fears… what if I submit the wrong thing at the wrong time… fear of the unknown… what am I going to get paid… fear of disorganization… how do I keep track of everything…”
• How to Find Ideal Clients And Why It’s Best to Focus on The Ideal Clients – Selling the Couch w/Keri Nola-“a direct focus helps people feel seen, heard, and understood…Learn how to connect with other people and organizations who are already serving your clients…”
• Lessons Learned (What I Wish Had Known…) In Private Practice – Practice of Therapy – “making small steps, putting the right systems in place, and learning how to outsource… value of understanding ROI… setting goals…”
• Telemental Health Across State Lines: Doing It Legally – Person-Centered Tech – “each state has its own licensing board which maintains its right to enforce its own rules within its own borders…”

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