Intensive Neuroscience for Clinicians Course: Bring the Brain into Therapy

CPD

Handouts

Faculty

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Objectives

1. Communicate how an understanding of neuroscientific research and neurological processes can help mental health professionals improve clinical outcomes.
2. Establish the interrelationship between depression and anxiety and communicate how this information can be used in relation to treatment planning.
3. Employ psychoeducation techniques that improve engagement in therapy by making neuroscience and neuroplasticity understandable for clients.
4. Formulate treatment plans that consider the limitations of medication based models and give clinicians options with depressed clients when medication doesn’t adequately relieve symptoms.
5. Analyze how neural pathways regulating stress are related to mental health disorders, and connect this information to your utilization of therapeutic interventions to manage the symptoms of anxiety.
6. Articulate how mindfulness practices can be used in therapy to shift clients to a relaxation response.
7. Evaluate how memory influences emotion and understand the clinical implications for altering client’s perceptions and behaviours.
8. Assess how childhood trauma changes the developmental trajectory of the brain, and explore the clinical manifestations of these impacts.
9. Elucidate how techniques that intervene in the neurobiological fight, flight, or freeze response can be used in the treatment of trauma.
10. Characterize how attachment impacts the brain’s development and informs the clinical treatment of affect regulation and mood disorders.
11. Determine how an understanding of the relationship between diet, sleep and exercise can be used in-session to motivate your clients to make healthier choices in their lives.
12. Appraise the latest scientific research on gratitude and establish how it could be used therapeutically to benefit clients dealing with stress, anxiety and depression.

Outline

Motivate and Engage Your Clients with Neuroscience

• Simple explanations on brain structure and function
• The neurobiology of specific disorders
• You can change – neuroplasticity and the potential for transformation

Teach Clients About Brain Health

• Sleep quality and mood
• Nutrition
• The habit of exercise
• The value of social support
• Detrimental impacts of stress

How the Neurobiology of Attachment and Relationships Informs Your Clinical Practice

• Neurobiological basis of attachment
• How relationships impact our brains
• Mirror neurons, empathy and connecting with others
• Oxytocin and the individual self
• How attachment style impacts your clients’ relationships
• Attachment and attunement in the therapeutic relationship

Trauma: Connect the Neurobiology of Trauma to Treatment

• Childhood trauma and the trajectory of brain development
• The fight/flight/freeze response
• Implicit memory and the limbic system
• Clinical techniques:
  • Trigger identification
  • Exposure
  • Guided imagery
  • Grounding strategies

Anxiety and Stress: Regulate Emotion and Interrupt Anxious Rumination

• How the brain is organized – and how it organizes
• Homeostasis, stress pathways and stress responses
• The resting state – the parasympathetic nervous system and mental health
• Emotional and thinking circuits, and perception of control – and why this matters to therapy
• Clinical techniques:
  • Mindful awareness of emotions – labelling emotions
  • Interventions that shift focus away from anxious rumination
  • Interrupt worry patterns with physical exercise
  • Diaphragmatic breathing exercises to regulate emotion
  • Resiliency – susceptibility to stress-based damage

Depression: Techniques to Intervene in the Downward Spiral

• The limitations of medication-based treatment
• Brain circuits involved in positive and negative emotion
• The brain’s negativity bias and depression risk
• The amygdala in the depressed brain
• The downward spiral
• Reconstructed memories
• Clinical techniques:
  • Behavioural Activation – get out of your head and into your life
  • Cognitive therapy tools – problem solving skills in the treatment plan
  • The psychology of obtainable goals
  • Self-compassion as a buffer to depressive symptoms

Neurocognitive Health Checkup

• Test of Variable Attention (TOVA)
• Mood evaluation
• Biochemical dysfunction and depression
• Measuring memory
• Brain injury
• Neurofeedback

Simple Biofeedback Tools for Regulating Physiological Responses

• Physiological control and psychology
• Biofeedback games
• Controlled breathing
• Heart Rate Variability
• EEG biofeedback training

Distractibility and the Brain: Cognitive Costs in the Land of Information Overload

• The myth of multitasking – Multitasking vs. task switching
• Synaptic pathways, mental states, memory and learning
• The pre-frontal cortex and flexible goal directed behaviour
• Teach clients coping strategies that can:
  • Reshape detrimental behavioural patterns
  • Decrease distractions
  • Build organizational and time management skills

The Neuroscience of Positive Psychology

• The science behind gratitude
  • Overcome barriers to practising gratitude
  • Easy-to-use gratitude exercises
• The neuroanatomy of forgiveness
• Strengths-based interventions
• Flow states
  • Merge action with awareness
  • Flow, the prefrontal cortex, and the inner critic
• Research limitations of positive psychology approaches

The Limitations of Neuroscientific Research and Potential Risks

• fMRI imaging
• Things to keep in mind regarding animal studies
• Simple explanations for complicated processes
• Research limitations, and treatment risks

Target Audience

• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Marriage and Family
• Therapists Occupational Therapists
• Addiction Counselors
• Case Managers
• Therapists Nurses
• Other Mental Health Professionals

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