Welcoming You To The Blog and our Two Core Education Series.

 For those of you who are now being directed to this blog for the first time, welcome.

This project was conceived last spring as my colleagues and I recognized that our expanding education projects warranted a dedicated blog.  Our aim here is to help you keep up with our programs, as well as to introduce you to new ideas in medicine, neuroscience, psychology and psychotherapy.    I will try and keep the blog current, as time goes by, presenting some of the new ideas introduced in our series, as well as some thoughts and reflections inspired by these programs.

Many of you will not be strangers to our two main education endeavors.  For those who have not come to any of these talks before, please check us out.  We are as much about community building and creating systems of mutual support as we are about continuing education.

The main Wednesday Evening Speakers Series was already going strong when I inherited the education chair position from my predecessor, Dr Michael Paré, who is now president of the section and continues to be an active member of the education committee.  You will see that this year we’ve added a seventh talk, extending the series into April.  The talks are generally on the first Wednesday of the month, but check your schedule to be sure – for instance I know we moved the January talk a week later to allow you time to recover from your New Year’s enjoyments and much needed rest.

Our second core series is named Caring for Self While Caring for Others.  When I took over as chair, I already had some ideas on where our education programming felt weak to me.  I wanted to re-define the section as more daring and innovative and vital, and more exempt from the sometimes deadening politics of modern medical culture.  We started with a new program of four Wednesday seminars on a third week of the month: Attachment Theory, Psychological Trauma, Dissociation and Mind/Body Illness and Mindsight: Towards an Integrated Psychotherapy.  This first series, introducing and deepening important areas that tended to be under-represented in family medicine and psychiatry, went well, and drew a mix of psychiatrists, GP psychotherapists, family physicians and non MD psychotherapists.  This led to a rich cross-fertilization of ideas. 

We decided though that to continue this series might be overkill.  At the same time, alarming news continued to spread about burgeoning levels of burnout and disenchantment in medicine and nursing.  Simply put, it now felt more compelling to create a second series focusing on stress and trauma-informed self-care, rather than focus on new advances in the field of neuroscience.  At any rate, we were cultivating the best of both worlds, because as this series enters its third year, we are now integrating the newest ideas in brain science, trauma and attachment theory and cultural changes in the helping professions, into our self-care series.  This series will continue to feature four new talks.  As well, we are hoping to have an additional fifth presentation from one of the staff of the Physician Health Program.  So keep an eye out for that, as well as a possible repeat of our off-site workshop on David Berceli’s trauma release exercises for self-care.

Releasing the psoas muscle is a main focus of the trauma-release exercises.

I’ll finish this post later this week, adding some further thoughts about the evolution of these two series, as well as commenting on some of my current thoughts on how we might continue to best meet our needs, the needs of our patients and the needs dictated by the rapid transformations of our age.

Please take the time to comment on the blog.  This is a home for you to share with other colleagues and to advance your own thoughts about integrating medical and mental health care. This is also your chance to influence our direction in offering education, as well as a portal for you to become more deeply involved and committed to the work of growth and change, so vital to the needs of our section.  I think you will emerge from this project with an expanded and more exciting view of the wealth of possibilities for healing and health that exist within the field of psychotherapy.