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DEI can take up valuable time, as well as emotional and mental resources. This is particularly true for graduate students and trainees, who are simultaneously juggling research, clinical training, and personal transitions. Here are FIVE ways to ensure the important work you do, is also working for you.

Often times, people struggling to move on from a breakup inadvertently act in ways that amplify their emotions of love towards the person, but these urges usually make us feel worse in the long term. So, what can we do? Enter “Opposite Action.”

Fear is one of the six basic human emotions, with a clear evolutionary purpose: to help us respond to danger and survive. In Exposure Therapy, providers create a safe environment to intentionally “expose” their clients to objects, activities, or situations they fear.

Experts Mona Potter, MD and Kathryn Boger, PhD, ABPP recently partnered with ADAA to host an insightful Q&A webinar addressing strategies for parenting children with anxiety and OCD. This blog to addresses the most common themes that emerged from the questions asked during the webinar.

The ability to be ourselves with clients makes it so much easier to connect, to be real about how challenging treatment is, and enlist their help to ensure that whatever the exposure is, its something they can tolerate, trust in, and most importantly, begin to experience relief from their intrusive thoughts and the compulsions that may dominate their lives. 

The recommendation most difficult to absorb by most clinicians is the suggestion that interventions that lower expectations of catastrophic or negative outcomes of exposure should be minimized in order to take advantage of the therapeutic effect of violating expectations. The question then arises as to how to motivate patients to do the exposure work while in the grip of serious anticipatory anxiety and suffering from the effects of their own anxiety sensitivity.

So definitely submit to present. You do have something to offer either as primarily a therapist or a researcher or both. Do not doubt, just submit and see what happens. Conference submissions are not weighted based on presenters in the review process, so you have just as good a chance at acceptance as more senior submitters if you have an interesting and well written proposal.

Happy Holidays! I wanted to end the year by taking a moment to reflect on my tenure as ADAA president - which was served entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the highlights of these two years has been all that we were able to accomplish together despite the chaos of the world.

The current pandemic has unleashed unique stressors on our health care community. While many medical and mental health care workers have responded with resilience, our health care workforce is not immune to the trauma and suffering they face.