All Webinars

This webinar provides a research and practice update on Alzheimer’s disease, with a focus on (1) new treatments, (2) diagnostic guidelines that rely heavily upon biomarkers and enable asymptomatic detection and diagnosis, and (3) growing prevention science. This workshop will use the 2021 APA Guidelines for the Assessment of Dementia and Age-Related Cognitive Decline as a framework to guide clinicians in navigating these developments and will provide attendees with a broad overview of Alzheimer’s disease and the psychologist’s role in assessment and intervention. The workshop describes an emerging practice opportunity for helping older adult and middle-aged clients to navigate a rapidly changing landscape.

High rates of adolescent depression and suicide present as a major international public health problem.  Suicidal adolescents are often a daunting population for clinicians to work with given their high-risk. Of the few effective treatments for this population, many are often multi-modal involving individual and group therapy, medication, etc.  An empirically supported family therapy for adolescents struggling with depression and suicide that requires only weekly sessions and which can be conducted on an outpatient, home-based, or inpatient basis is Attachment-Based Family Therapy (ABFT).  ABFT emerges from interpersonal theories suggesting adolescent depression and suicide can be precipitated, exacerbated, or buffered against by the quality of interpersonal family relationships. It is a trust-based, emotion-focused psychotherapy model aiming to repair interpersonal ruptures and rebuild an emotionally protective, secure-based, parent-child relationship. The therapy is trauma-focused while also being brief and structured. Treatment is characterized by five treatment tasks: a) reframing the therapy to focus on interpersonal development, b) building alliance with the adolescent, c) building alliance with the parents, d) facilitation conversations to resolve attachment ruptures and e) promoting autonomy in the adolescent. 

In this workshop, Dr Levy will use lecture and case studies to provide an overview of the theoretical principles, research support, and clinical strategies forABFT. Dr. Levy will review how attachment theory,emotional regulation, and trauma resolution informthe delivery of this treatment approach.  She will review the goals and structureof the five treatment tasks that provide a roadmapfor delivering this interpersonally focused psychotherapy effectively and rapidly in community mental health.

Group therapy is a treatment modality in which unrelated people meet together with a therapist, in contrast to individual therapy or conjoint family therapy. Groups are not a second-rate approach to helping people change. In fact, groups are often the treatment of choice - especially when a client’s problem has an interpersonal component (which is usually the case). Groups offer a natural laboratory in which people can experiment with new ways of being and receive feedback from numerous others. There is great power in groups: members actually experience their interpersonal dynamics playing out in the group. A group therapist can implement techniques from other modalities in a group format. However, there are dynamics, processes, and stages of groups that are not shared with individual approaches and which offer distinctive benefits. Because so many of the problems that people seek mental
health services for involve dysfunctional interactions between people, having group members actually interact with others in the group affords an opportunity for deep, experiential learning and development that is not possible in individual therapy. This seminar will emphasize how to facilitate such “here and now” interactions and processes in group work.

The relationship between trauma and addiction is becoming increasingly well established in the literature. This is no surprise, as clinicians working “in the trenches” know all too well that people with unresolved trauma and emotional wounds often turn to substances as a way to “numb out,” forget, or otherwise self-medicate to regulate their emotions. Conversely, people with addictive behavior disorders may drive while impaired, gravitate towards toxic relationships, go to dangerous places to get their substance of choice, or engage in many other behaviours that increase their risk of being traumatized and their vulnerability factors for developing PTSD or other trauma and stress related disorders.  It is also known that when cooccurrence is involved, this presents clinicians with a more complicated course of treatment and less favorable treatment outcomes that when clients present with only one or the other.
 

The good news is, there is hope! While neuroscience has taught us much about this phenomenon in recent years, evidence-based Cognitively based treatments are still being shown to  be at least as effective as many “newer” approaches, and in some circles seem to have almost gotten lost in the shuffle. 

Recent protocols have attempted to incorporate PE (prolonged exposure) and other cognitive behavioral treatments with substance use disorder treatments. While further research is needed in this area, the mandate for integration of treatments when dealing with this population seems integral to obtain more favorable outcomes for individuals with these complex conceptualizations.
 

Leave this full-day online training let by international CBT expert Jeff Riggenbach, PhD, with an improved understanding of the neuroscience of trauma, a integrated approach to treating PTSD and addictions, and armed with a plethora of evidence-based, yet practical new tools to equip and empower this group to find levels of recovery that have previously been eluding them!