Recordings from the ABCT 2022 Convention in NYC, including Invited Addresses, Invited Panels, and the Presidential Address and the Charles Silverstein Lifetime Achievement Social Justice Award.

Sleep disturbance is a highly significant psychological health problem. There is an established evidence base indicating that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is a powerful intervention for many sleep disturbances, even when the sleep disturbance is co-morbid with another psychiatric or medical disorder. This webinar will provide an overview of case conceptualization, CBT-I and cognitive therapy approaches, all within a transdiagnostic framework.

Our society is changing in dramatic ways in recognizing the diversity of sexual expression and gender identification that are part of the full human experience. Mental health professionals have been coming together with medical professionals to provide services for gender variant youth in the past with recent advances made in the approach through specialty, innovative programs. Dr. Tishelman will provide a foundation for understanding gender diversity and the psychosocial issues that arise for gender diverse youth. She will bring insight to this webinar from her research and clinical experience in one of the main centers at the forefront of this emerging field. The webinar provides the basics that are incorporated in training and supervision for medical and mental health professionals and professionals in training. The program is designed to help those professionals and students that wish to gain an initial understanding of the mental health role in serving gender diverse youth with compassion and expertise.

Despite the proliferation of evidence-based psychological interventions and other effective services in global mental health, there has been a lack of standardized approach to measure competency of non-specialist and specialists providing mental health services. Moreover, governments, national professional organizations, and training institutions have not had a mechanism to ensure that providers are delivering safe and effective care. To address this gap, the World Health Organization and UNICEF have developed Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support and Mental Health Services (EQUIP). EQUIP is an initiative with a suite of easy-to-use competency assessment tools in standardized role plays and a digital platform for providing real-time visualizations and feedback to improve training and supervision. In this webinar we will provide an introduction to EQUIP and provide examples of its use in various contexts and sectors, including in pre service education settings.

Socrates was pronounced by the ancient Oracle as the wisest of his time. His philosophy was all about overcoming our ignorance and living a good life. From his teachings, many lines of philosophy were born. Ancient Stoicism was born out of Socratic wisdom. In the last decade there has been an explosion of interest in Stoicism worldwide. While ‘lowercase s’ stoicism conveys the idea of being unemotional or emotionally suppressed, ‘capital S’ Stoicism is a philosophy and ancient wisdom that dates back over 2000 years. Albert Ellis famously quoted the Roman philosopher Epictetus who said, “Men are not disturbed by things, but by their view of things.” Hundreds of years prior to Epictetus, Chrysippus wrote the first CBT book called On Emotions which detailed how our emotional reactions were influenced by our interpretations of situations (thoughts). There is a wealth of Stoic wisdom that CBT has yet to capitalize on. Notably, the goal of Stoicism is to tolerate discomfort and focus on living a good life that is in line with your values. In this way, Stoicism is actually more compatible with mindfulness- and acceptance-based approaches like modern Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. This webinar will focus on the methods of Socrates (Socratic Questioning) and the lived philosophy that was born from his work (Stoicism). This talk is being offered as a fundraiser for the World Confederation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. Dr Scott Waltman will be speaking as a Global Ambassador of that organization. The talk will be geared toward clinicians, Stoics, and mental health consumers.

eHealth and mHealth technologies, such as Internet websites, mobile apps, and wearable devices, have been increasingly developed to deliver and facilitate behavioral and cognitive treatments. Accumulating research continues to demonstrate the efficacy of such resources for improving the management of behavioral and mental health issues with strong support for behavioral and cognitive approaches. Unfortunately, few practitioners have received training or education regarding practical concerns related to these technological resources or best practices for integrating them into practice. This webinar will present strategies for identifying and evaluating eHealth and mHealth technologies and discuss a variety of practical concerns including understanding data security and privacy, using technology to support treatment, and documenting the use of technology in clinical notes. We will discuss the evolving regulatory landscape regarding websites, apps, and digital therapeutics and provide guidance as to how professionals can better understand, search for, and evaluate different resources. We will then present information regarding clinical integration of technologies including working technology into one’s workflow, introduction technologies into clinical care, using technologies in support of a treatment plan, reviewing data collected through these resources, and documenting the use of technologies in clinical records. We will close with a discussion of some emerging technologies in the behavioral and mental health space to provide practitioners with some ideas of what to expect in this rapidly developing and evolving field.

The racially stressful events of the past decade, punctuated by the current “double pandemic” of COVID-19 and racially-implicated deaths of Black individuals, have heightened the call for anti-racism in various spheres of influence, including in clinical work. Principle-driven strategies for treatment, often found in “Third Wave” adaptations to cognitive and behavioral treatment, have the potential to imbue principles of anti-racism more thoroughly into treatment while maintaining the integrity of evidence-based treatment protocols. This presentation will discuss the ethical responsibility of practitioners to engage in anti-racist work, review literature of existing third-wave interventions (i.e. DBT, ACT) that use principle-driven anti-racist strategies to present culturally humble care, and focus participants on their own committed action to anti-racism in their own practice.

This presentation will: 1) sum up findings of approximately 40 randomized, controlled trials evaluating the effects of cognitive rehabilitation on cognitive outcomes in SMI; 2) demonstrate the basics of cognitive training programs, including cognitive practice software, strategy coaching, meta cognitive strategies, and compensatory strategies; 3) provide examples of the generalization of cognitive task practice to performance of work tasks; 4) describe the Thinking Skills for Work Program, a cognitive enhancement program that is intergrated with supported employment, and contains 5 specific components, including assessment, cognitive task practice, individualized self-management strategies, job search planning, and job support consultation.

Until recently, bipolar disorder was rarely diagnosed in youth. Now diagnostic rates have exploded and “bipolar” is the most common diagnosis for psychiatrically hospitalized youth. There is concern that bipolar disorder is being over-diagnosed and over-medicated in children. Fortunately, there has been a surge of evidence about the validity of carefully diagnosed bipolar in youths, along with better evidence-based tools for assessment and treatment. This mini-workshop provides a brief overview of evidence-based assessment of bipolar disorder in youth and available biological interventions, emphasizing what non-prescribing clinicians need to know about these treatments. The majority of the mini-workshop focuses on how to conceptualize comprehensive care and delineates specific therapeutic techniques. Therapeutic techniques taught come from the individual-family and multi-family versions of psychoeducational psychotherapy (IF-PEP, MF-PEP), one of the most promising evidence-based approaches to managing mood disorders in youth. Treatment techniques include: learning about the disorder and its treatment, differentiating the child from the disorder, building emotion regulation “tool kits,” CBT fundamentals, problem solving, verbal and nonverbal skill enhancement, improving “healthy habits” (sleep hygiene, eating and exercise), navigating the mental health and school systems to build more effective treatment teams, changing maladaptive family patterns, and specific symptom management strategies.

Approximately two million children have been impacted by parental deployments associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The majority of these children are under the age of eight years yet few intervention services are available for the young child. The Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health stated, “The system of care of psychological health that has evolved over recent decades is insufficient to meet the needs of today’s forces and their beneficiaries and will not be sufficient to meet their needs in the future.” As EBTs are adapted, it is essential to maintain fidelity to treatment models to determine if outcomes seen in civilian populations can be replicated. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is one evidenced-based practice that is currently being adapted to address the gap in serving military families with very young children. The webinar will review the stressors common in military families at all phases of development and will summarize current research on the impact of deployment on young children and families. The presentation will give a brief overview Parent-Child Interaction Therapy and how it is being adapted for military families. Findings from a small pilot study with Army families will be shared. The webinar will conclude with current efforts to disseminate PCIT for use with military families and suggested next steps to better serve those who have given so much.