This presentation will use national stratified data from a recent Harris Poll to reveal Americans’ attitudes regarding psychology, the scientific basis of our discipline, how psychology compares with other scientific fields, and whether prior educational experience in psychology affects these perceptions. Data offer opportunities for discussions among clinical scientists regarding public education, and behaviors we can engage in as individuals, and as a field, to modify perceptions of psychological science.

Dr. Persons will define measurement-based care, describe reasons for providing MBC, offer hypotheses about why MBC might lead to improved client outcome, and describe steps to take to provide MBC, with many clinical examples and tools that learners can use to implement MBC. This webinar is ideal for private practitioners but is useful to therapists who provide CBT to adults in any outpatient setting.

The idea that people can be lastingly harmed by their own transgressive behavior and can suffer because of others’ moral failures is as old as humanity, yet these age-old concepts have only recently been considered as clinically relevant social, biological, spiritual, and psychological problems. Moral injury (MI) is the multidimensional outcome from exposure to transgressive harms that undermine foundational beliefs about the goodness and trustworthiness of oneself, others, or the world. Although moral injury has gained widespread acceptance, we have only just recently defined the syndrome and generated a method to measure the syndrome that can be used clinically. I will define the boundary conditions for MI and distinguish MI as a clinical problem in contrast to moral frustration and moral stress, describe the domains impacted by exposure to morally injurious events, provide an assessment tool that can be used clinically and in research, provide case conceptualization heuristics and treatment approaches that can be used when MI is the principal target (e.g., when a traumatic event is a MI) or when another presenting problem is colored by MI, and discuss process issues that arise when clinicians are confronted with the existential realities of grave transgressive behaviors or high stakes systemic failures.

Suicide remains the 10th leading cause of death for all individuals in the United States and is the second leading cause of death for individuals between the ages of 35 and 54 (CDC, 2018). Evidence based practice around suicide prevention and treatment can be difficult to understand and implement, causing tension between ethical standards of avoiding harm and practicing within areas of competency with day-to-day clinical obligations. This training seeks to find balance between resolving ethical tensions and increasing competencies regarding the treatment of suicidal patients. Participants will review up-to-date information on best practices for suicidal patients, practice interventions, and use working with suicidal clients as a lens from which discuss ethical codes related to practice.

Recorded June 24, 2022 - In recent years, the impact of stress due to racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of identity-related discrimination has received greater attention at a national level. This presentation will discuss how to broach the topic of discrimination, provide practical strategies for assessment, and discuss tailoring cognitive and behavioral interventions across multiple mental health conditions with cultural sensitivity.

College students with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often display significant deficits in their academic and psychosocial functioning. Such impairments place students with ADHD at increased risk for future negative outcomes during their post-college adult years. Thus, it is critically important for this population to have ready access to evidence-based treatment while attending college. This presentation will begin by providing an overview of what is known about the impact of ADHD on the educational, emotional, social, and personal functioning of college students. Next, a conceptual framework for understanding the mechanisms underlying these outcomes will be presented. This will be followed by a brief review of currently available treatment options for this population. The remainder of this presentation will focus on a recently developed intervention known as ACCESS – Accessing Campus Connections and Empowering Student Success - to illustrate how cognitive-behavioral therapy strategies can be used to address the multiple treatment needs of college students with ADHD. This discussion of ACCESS will begin by addressing its conceptual underpinnings, its programmatic development and refinement, and the evidence in support of its efficacy derived from an initial open clinical trial and a recently completed multi-site randomized controlled trial. This will be followed by a detailed description of its therapeutic components, along with recommendations for how to implement ACCESS in various campus and off-campus settings.

Socratic questioning is a transtheoretical omnipresent psychotherapeutic process. Effective use of Socratic questioning in session is predictive of symptoms change; this relationship holds even after controlling for the relationship. However, there is some evidence that learning to artfully and competently use Socratic strategies in session is among the hardest skills for a psychotherapist to learn. Of course, Socrates was not a therapist and a pure application of the Socratic Method with a perfect fidelity would not be therapeutic. This webinar presents a more empathic and collaborative approach to using Socratic strategies in a clinical context; Socratic strategies are integrated with good clinical practices in a manner that is consistent with the evidence-base of what constitutes effective therapy. This webinar presents a framework for teaching clients and therapists how to use Socratic cognitive and behavior change strategies. This framework is based on methods that have proven effective training several thousand frontline public mental health therapists in how to deliver high quality cognitive behavior therapy. Participants will be taught how to use a four-step framework for Socratic questioning. Collaborative empiricism appropriately describes this process of using collaborative strategies to join with the client in applying scientific curiosity to their thought processes. Participants will learn how to use Socratic questioning strategies both within a single session and consistently across a number of sessions to bring about change in patient schema (i.e., core beliefs). Webinar will focus on applied examples and demonstrations.