Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, depression was already ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the number one cause of human suffering and disability. The pandemic caused a huge spike in rates of depression giving rise to serious questions about the way we think about depression. Is it primarily a neurochemical phenomenon? Is it a product of environmental and situational influences? Or both? This conversation will explore these questions and others as well.
Over the last 30 years Amen Clinics has built the world’s largest database of functional brain scans related to psychiatry, totaling nearly 200,000 SPECT scans on patients from 150 countries. In this conversation hour Dr. Amen will discuss the biggest lessons he has learned from this database and how this information can also help practitioners in their clinical practices, even if clients never get scanned.
"This demonstration will show how activating a client's creative process is the key factor in generative psychotherapy. This process follows these steps:
(1) Opening a creative safe space
(2) Identifying a goal (A positive change or transforming a negative pattern)
(3) Identifying and welcoming both obstacles and resources
(4) Weaving and integrating the parts into a new "mosaic of self"
(5) Orienting to future application of changes.
Therapy is successful when clients are able to experientially realize positive life changes. While the identification and transformation of symptoms is important in this regard, the activation of the client's creative capacity to change is even more important. This paper outlines 6 steps in this therapeutic process: (1) opening a mindful field, (2) setting positive intentions, (3) developing and maintaining a creative state, (4) identifying a "storyboard" for achieving goals, (5) transforming negative experiences, and (6) everyday practices. Metho
The process of contracting for change in the initial session will be described and discussed. Methods of targeting goals will be compared and contrasted.
This workshop will focus on themes of love and dependence, love and anxiety, love and power in exploring how the interplay of these factors govern whether an intimate relationship thrives or fails. The importance of these themes for both individual and couples therapy.
What does it mean to be intraconnected? In weaving the internal and external, the subjective and objective, this workshop will reveal how modern culture, as well as how our brain is wired, may give us a message of separation as a solo, isolated self; yet a wider perspective unveils that who we are, what a deeper reality actually is, may be something more—broader than the brain, bigger even than the body—fundamental to the social systems and the natural world in which we live. We will explore the nature of how our experience of what we often call, self, emerges across the lifespan and how this journey into identity and belonging can help weave our personal reflections with scientific discussions into how the mind, brain, and relationships shape who we are.
Resilience is the ability of individuals to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions and to regain and maintain a sense of equilibrium. Achieving resilience during challenging times requires the development and strengthening of a variety of resources on different levels. These include emotional intelligence, behavioral flexibility, the ability to balance "dreamer" with "realist," and the capacity to connect with something bigger than ourselves. This session will address a number of important skills and processes that support the deepening of people's capacity for resilience – behaviorally, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
In offering effective psychotherapy there are times for being informative and other times for being evocative. Use information when needed; use evocative means when the target is the realization of a concept, such as responsibility, motivation, or connection.
Evocative methods are used in all performing arts because the goal is to prompt a change in mood and perspective. Evocative methods will be extracted from art and applied in clinical practice.
Demonstration, lecture, practice groups.
This talk identifies the seven core dimensions of an effective, sustainable therapy change: 1. a state of positive well being, 2. a positive resonant goal, 3. resources, 4. welcoming obstacles, 5. fluid "ideas of achievement", 6. commitment to practical action, 7. commitment to daily practices. The practical ways to develop and integrate these complementary dimensions will be highlighted.