Tag: Mental health

Resources on Post-Storm Trauma, CPT Codes, Veterans’ Services and More

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If you read this blog often, you will notice that I regularly link to articles and other resources posted by The National Council. While we have exhibited at their conference, our organization has never been a member of The National Council. We have, however, been a grateful promoter of the resources that this organization shares freely with the behavioral health community. If you have never gone to their website or attended a webinar, you should take the opportunity to do so. They provide outstanding information in a timely manner. In spite of not being members, we have never been prevented from attending webinars or sharing in their well-researched and well-documented information.

I wanted to point you to some of the current information being provided by The National Council.

  1. Last week I talked about the need to have your own emergency contingency plans in case of storms and other natural and unnatural disasters. Since most of you are providers of behavioral health services, you will also find yourselves dealing with clients who have experienced the same trauma you have gone through. Just this afternoon, a webinar entitled Mitigating Disaster Trauma: Lessons from Sandy was presented by The National Council. While the webinar is over, The National Council routinely records webinar presentations for later viewing. You should be able to view this one within 48 hours.
  2. On November 9, Manon and I attended the Council’s webinar on CPT Code changes for 2013. Both the recording of the webinar and the slide deck from the presentation are available. In addition, a December 3 webinar has been scheduled to provide additional information about the new Evaluation and Management CPT Codes and how to use them. Registration is still open for that event.
  3. A new report announced by The Council reveals the incredible costs of the unmet mental health needs of returning U.S. Veterans. Having just passed Veterans Day, this is a sad reality we all need to be educated about. Those of you who provide services to Veterans will find the report of interest.

Please be sure to reference these resources properly if you refer to them in any of your own newsletters and announcements. The National Council does outstanding work in educating the behavioral health community and deserves credit for all the work they do!

Please share other resources that you find useful in your work. We love to be able to let our readers know about the wonderful materials that are available to them to enhance the outstanding work you all do in providing mental health services to all who need them.

 

Energy at Work: What recharges you?

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Last night I saw a great horned owl sitting at the top of a tall pine tree silhouetted against the sky.

We had been hearing the hoots of the owls for the past several weeks. Sometimes we would hear him near bedtime when we walked outside briefly to say good night to departing guests or to pet our front porch cat. A few times I heard him calling early in the morning.

I had looked for him before, but seeing a bird in the dark is a real challenge, especially not really knowing where to look. It can be a challenge to localize the source of a bird call, especially one as loud and deep as that of an owl. The sound bounces off nearby houses and trees.

Last night, I walked out into an open part of my front yard and looked up toward the tops of very tall pine trees a couple of properties away from mine. I saw movement at the top of a tree, then saw a very large bird fly off. As I kept watching, I saw a second bird fly from the same location to the top of a nearby pine tree. It sat on the very top of the tree so I could see its 2+ foot height dark against the lighter sky. I ran inside to get my binoculars and he waited in the same spot. I had no camera with the power to photograph it, so my brain will need to store the image. And it will!

I am not a serious birder. I do not have a life list that I seek to fill. I do get significant pleasure from sighting birds that share my locale. It is a major recharge event for me.

You see, I have long found that I require a great deal of self-care and stress management to function well. When I worked as a psychologist, I used a variety of methods, mostly focused on professional involvement and time spent with other people. After 15 years of practice, I had burned out. I had not done enough to take care of myself.

I believe this is a major problem among behavioral healthcare workers. The job of assisting other people in being mentally healthy is a very difficult one. The chronically and seriously mentally ill can be a very satisfying but very draining population with which to work. Finding ways to recharge and re-energize is crucial to doing this work well.

Now that I work with providers of behavioral healthcare services instead of with patients themselves, I still need to do lots of self-care. Bicycling, gardening, watching the birds in my garden and near my home . . . these have become the ways I energize myself.

How do you take care of yourself? What recharges your batteries? Does your practice or organization have tools to help you with your self-care? When did you last see a great horned owl?

Please share your thoughts and experiences. When you offer your insights, you give other readers additional ideas to explore. Please do so!

Habits, Habits, Habits: How do they affect your life?

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In May, I received an email from Charles Duhigg, NY Times reporter and author of The Power of Habit. Or rather, I should say that I received an email from Charles Duhigg’s publisher/publicist who is very good at finding bloggers who have written about psychological topics and who might be interested in his book. Their marketing research was right on target, (see chapter 7, How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do), no pun intended. I am, indeed, interested in certain psychological research, and I did find his book fascinating and very well written. In my former life as a psychotherapist, I would even have recommended it to patients. Instead, I will recommend it to you.

How many times have you discovered a pattern of behavior that you would like to change? How many times have you been successful in making the change?

If you struggle as much as I do with habit change, it is not because you are weak-willed. It is likely because you do not have a complete understanding of the behavior you are trying to change, what cues the behavior, and how the reward impacts you. Even if you are clear about those elements, you might have ignored the necessary step of substituting a competing behavior to replace the one you are trying to change.

Not sure you know what I am talking about? No surprise to me. Most of us are not very good at even realizing that we are engaged in habitual behavior until someone else points it out to us.

I recently had a visit from my nephew and his family. Near the end of their stay, his 3-1/2 year old son was using the word “actually” appropriately in many of his comments. “Actually, that’s a tufted titmouse. He takes a seed from the feeder, then goes to the bush to eat it.” It was not until he left that my sister-in-law and I heard me using “actually” often in my comments. It took a 3-1/2 year old to help me see habitual speech behavior that has been with me for who knows how long.

Duhigg’s book is an excellent exploration of habits and their power in our personal lives, in business, and in society. He clearly presents a framework for habit change that most individuals and any therapist can use:

THE FRAMEWORK:

• Identify the routine

• Experiment with rewards

• Isolate the cue

• Have a plan

Duhigg, Charles (2012-02-28). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (p. 274). Random House, Inc. Kindle Edition.

Part of what appeals to me about this Framework is that it presents a simple system. My personal inclination in life is toward making things systematic and understanding the systems that apply when something is not of my making; so this approach is appealing to my sense of order.

  1. Observe and assess the behavior. Determine what is included in this habit. Get a good picture of the whole thing and how it functions in your life. In Duhigg’s words, identify the routine.
  2. Take a look at just what is rewarding to you in this behavior. Since the reward is a large part of what is keeping the habit in place, understand it well and look at as many aspects of the reward as you can. You may think one part of the reinforcement is what is maintaining your behavior when another part is actually the driver. As Duhigg says, experiment with rewards.
  3. Get a good understanding of just what the trigger is for the habit. What sets it off? For me, sitting down at my desk at work in the morning is my cue to check email. Even if I have decided to do something else first (like write a blog post), the strong pull is for me to check email. According to Duhigg’s framework, isolate the cue.
  4. Finally, in order to change an habitual behavior, you need to determine what you want to do instead, how you will make yourself aware of the cue so you do not go into automatic, what reward you will use to alter the habit, how long you will do the changed behavior to solidify the new habit…as Mr. Duhigg suggests, have a plan.

The simplicity of this framework is part of its power…and part of the power of habits in our lives. If your own habits, the habits of your business or organization, or the habits of our society are important to you, take a look at this book. It is simultaneously a good read and enlightening.

Do you have experiences with habits and habit change that you would be willing to share? WAIT…this is where you would usually STOP READING. Maybe you could change that habit and offer a comment today? Your reward? My profound thanks for reading and commenting. Just enter your comment below.

 

Square Foot Gardening: Self-care modality

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When I was a first year graduate student in psychology, we studied many personality theories as well as a variety of methods of psychotherapy. As a traditional Western institution of higher learning, the program I attended mentioned non-traditional and alternative approaches but gave them relatively short shrift. As a result, we students developed shorthand ways of referring to the methods about which we learned very little. One of those methods was Morita Therapy. We referred to it as digging-in-the-dirt therapy.

First, I will make profound apologies to Dr. Shoma Morita, The Morita School, and The ToDo Institute for the lightness with which we treated this Japanese School of Psychology. We focused on one kind of direct action in the world that was used in this therapy. . . working in a garden. That is one very tiny piece of this Zen Buddhist inspired method.

Fortunately for me, it is the piece I took away and have used throughout my adult life. Gardening has always been the way I nurture myself. Getting down on my hands and knees and getting my hands into the dirt is one of the most profound ways I have experienced of centering myself and taking care of myself. It is the action I take to relieve anxiety and to recover from sadness.

This past week, I expanded my gardening repertoire. I had the exciting experience of completing a teacher certification class offered by the Square Foot Gardening Foundation.

In the past six months, I have had two people point me to Square Foot Gardening. . . a friend in South Florida who had undertaken one there, and my nephew Zachary who had planted one in Chicago last summer. Many years ago, I had read about Square Foot Gardening in a chapter of a book entitled Florida Home Grown 2: The Edible Landscape by Tom MacCubbin. Like most gardeners, I found it very hard to believe that so much could grow successfully in so little space. . . so I did not try the method. With Zachary’s encouragement, I purchased a copy of the All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. I quickly decided this was for me. When, one week later, a third friend told me about the teacher class being held in my home county, I knew the synchronicity was too compelling to ignore.

What could possibly be so exciting about gardening? Why would anyone want to spend their time in the dirt rather than walking the aisles of the food store?

Have you ever eaten freshly picked vegetables? Have you felt the satisfaction of planting, nurturing and harvesting beautiful, nutritious food that tastes wonderful? Have you ever felt the sense of well-being that goes with producing your own food?

Square Foot Gardening can be done by anyone in tiny spaces with little work, small quantities of water, virtually no weeds, and lots of results. Mel says you can get 100% of the harvest in 20% of the space, with 20% of the water and less than 5% of the work of a traditional row garden. The above-ground boxes divided by a grid provide a unique, attractive garden.  Because you grow in a mix of vermiculite, peat moss (or coconut coir) and blended compost placed in a 4 x 4 box over weed blocking  fabric, you start with no weed seeds and can keep the garden free of weeds easily.  In fact, you can even place boxes on hard surfaces like parking lots or driveways. If bending over is a problem for you, you can build your box on a tabletop. In a recent blog, Mel addressed the 10 most common excuses for not gardening. Which ones are yours?

For me, there are two crucial reasons to garden. (1) Gardening can dramatically improve mental health, reducing anxiety and depression. (2) Producing one’s own food creates a strong sense of self-sufficiency. In fact, I can imagine that a Square Foot Garden built and maintained by patients in residential and intensive outpatient programs, or at a community mental health center could produce major therapeutic effects.

If you are interested in learning more about Square Foot Gardening, please feel free to contact me. You can also visit any of the site links above. And, as always, I love to hear your comments!

 

Psychology Podcasts: Current info on the Internet

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I know all of you have huge amounts of time on your hands, right? Of course, that is not true. We are all terribly pressed for time. One way that many busy professionals have learned to increase their exposure to recent information in their fields of expertise is through listening to podcasts on an iPod or other mp3 or mp4 player.

Wikipedia defines podcast as “a type of digital media consisting of an episodic series of files (either audio or video) subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication.”

Those of you are under 30 are asking why I am defining the word podcast. Certainly, everyone knows what a podcast is. I am doing so because there are many of us in the 40+ age group who have never listened to or viewed a podcast, even if we know what it is. We are still getting up to speed!

I wanted to let you know that American Psychological Association (APA) mentioned the growing availability of psychology podcasts in the January edition of the Monitor on Psychology. There are shows that focus on the brain and behavior, others on the mind, others are interviews with psychologists and neuroscience researchers. It is an extensive list!

Obviously, there are lots of ways to find podcasts that might interest you. A quick Google search for ‘Podcast Directories’ turned up 63,600,000 results. You are bound to find some interesting ones in these listings.

I have not yet downloaded podcasts. I do, however, have benefit of listening to some of those Seth has downloaded. One of my favorites is Science Friday, an NPR radio program that also uses the podcast format. They frequently have psychology and mental health-related shows.

I hope you will try out some of these resources to determine if they are a good way for you to access information in your field of expertise. If you are already hooked on podcasts, please share the names of some of those you like, whether related to behavioral health or to other areas.