Recovery from "schizophrenia" and other "psychotic disorders"

Currently I don’t have any full day (6 hour) seminars scheduled, but there are a couple of introductory workshops.

One is at the Oregon NASW 2010 Statewide Conference, Friday, March 12.  I will be talking for 1.5 hours on “Understanding relationships between psychosis and trauma.”  Information on this conference is available at www.nasworegon.org/continuing-education/nasw-workshops/

I will also be speaking at the OregonPsychological Association on Saturday May 8, on the subject “Cognitive Therapy for Psychosis.”  That will also be a 1.5 hour presentation. 

Descriptions of the 6 hour seminars that I often present (most recently January 2010 at Portland State University) are below.

The first seminar is an introduction to cognitive therapy for psychosis, which is a psychological approach to helping people who hear voices or have beliefs so “far out” that most mental health workers would propose drugs as the only possible treatment.  In contrast, cognitive therapy assumes that people can learn to change how they handle what goes on in their minds, and that this change is most likely when therapists collaborate as partners in figuring how to make sense of things, rather than pretend to be “experts” who can tell people what to think.  This approach draws people into taking an active role in their own recovery, which in turn can lead to a reduction in reliance on medications. 

The second seminar focuses on the relationship between “psychosis” and trauma, a relationship usually denied by the mental health system which instead attempts to convince people they have a strictly “biological illness” or “biochemical imbalance.”  This second seminar helps you to help people understand the relationships that are possible between life events and current distress, and how to use that understanding in working toward recovery.

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