The discrepancy between need and access to mental health services is uncontestable. An estimated 57% to 67% of adults experiencing mental illness in the United States do not receive needed services. The need-to-access gap is even wider for children and adolescents: Up to 80% of youths with mental health needs go without services each year. Even among those who do access care, treatment is often brief: international service-use data suggests that the modal number of sessions attended is just one. This creates a need to quantify and capitalize on what can be accomplished therapeutically, given appropriate targeting and structure, in a short period of time. Therefore, this talk will outline recent innovations in single-session interventions (SSIs) for mental health problems, including the evidence supporting their effects; how they might yield clinically-meaningful change; resources for delivering evidence-based SSIs; and where, when, and how they can be delivered. Understanding SSIs’ promise creates an opportunity for a paradigm shift in our field’s thinking about constructing services for broad-scale impact. SSIs can operate as stand-alone services or as adjunctive services within existing care systems; as such, learning to study and provide SSIs may improve the reach of effective mental health interventions while mitigating problems linked to long waiting lists, global provider shortages, and high costs of traditional care.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is the most common gastrointestinal (GI) disorder seen by primary care and GI physicians, accounts for considerable personal suffering, and is largely refractory to medical therapies. Its physical symptoms (pain, diarrhea and/or constipation) commonly co-occur with other psychological complaints (e. g. GAD, depression) that behavior therapists effectively treat and thus offer a gratifying way of expanding one’s clinical practice. In the absence of any organic cause, IBS is best understood from a biopsychosocial perspective (Van Oudenhove et al., 2016, Gastroenterology) that emphasizes the reciprocal and interactive relationship among a person’s biology (e. g., GI motility, pain sensitivity, stress reactivity), behaviors (e. g., avoidance), and higher order central processes (rigid cognitive style characterized by perseverative thought manifested in restricted coping and perceptual biases to threat) that influence GI symptoms. Clinical trials assessing the efficacy of CBT for IBS have established it as a gold standard psychological treatment, yielding dramatic, rapid, broad, and sustained symptom improvement that compares favorably to pharmacological or dietary treatments (Mayer, 2007, New England Journal of Medicine). After a brief overview of IBS, this workshop will describe the conceptual underpinnings of CBT for IBS, its rationale, goals and technical components using didactic instruction and detailed case examples from actual patients enrolled in a landmark NIH trial (Lackner, Jaccard, et al., Gastroenterology, 2018) that affirmed CBT’s status as the most widely endorsed empirically validated psychological treatment (Black. et al., GUT, 2020) and arguably the most effective behavioral treatment for any chronic pain disorder. Attendees will learn practical strategies to trouble shoot around difficult clinical issues to maximize outcome, patient engagement, and clinician satisfaction.

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.