In this Climate Change & Mental Health 101, the speaker will go over the neuropsychiatric impacts of extreme weather, heat, air pollution, nutritional disease, and rising vector illnesses, and then turn to the emotional effects of climate change, discussing the syndromes of grief, anxiety, anger, and hopelessness in response to climate change and considering how they may be responded to psychotherapeutically in both group and individual settings.

“Trauma” is becoming a word that is increasingly used on social media to describe a variety of events and reactions. This talk discusses the fundamental aspects of diagnoses related to trauma as well as basic clinical interaction, with an aim to increase confidence in working with traumatized patients, even for a single encounter. Topics to be covered include differential diagnosis of trauma, basic neurobiological aspects of trauma and how this relates to treatment, and strategies for communicating with these patients.

This presentation was originally reviewed on April 19, 2023, and broadcast live online on April 19, 2023, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET.

This presentation will cover a case presentation on a patient seen over the course of two years during training. She will discuss themes relating to early trauma, the therapeutic frame, and the idea of containment in psychotherapy. She will lean on concepts drawn from object relations theory, which aided in the understanding and evolution of this case.

This presentation was originally reviewed on March 21, 2023, and broadcast live online on March 22, 2023, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET.

This presentation will help you understand how to approach a problem that has increased in the era of legalized Cannabis. A teen patient tells they are using marijuana because it is safe and legal. They even will tell you how it is "helping" them with their mental health. How do you proceed in a way that will actually help your patient? You will get practical tools to help by attending this presentation.

This presentation was originally reviewed on March 6, 2023, and broadcast live online on March 8, 2023, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET.

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Spoken by Frederick Douglas in 1855 these words still ring true. And they hold great relevance to mental health professionals - even more so for those of us entrusted with training the psychiatric workforce. Against the setting of an acute on chronic youth mental health crisis and gaping youth mental health professional shortages, many child psychiatry fellowship slots go unfilled each year. This is but one manifestation of the misalignment between academia and training as usual and what is needed to meet our society’s needs. While increasing needed and long overdue attention and resources are being allocated to addressing various interpersonal and structural ‘isms, adultism is an afterthought - if thought of at all. The absence of the youth voice, the paltry allocation of public dollars to children and families, and even our own psychiatric diagnostic criteria disadvantage children and adolescents. This disadvantage has practical implications for well-characterized social determinants of mental health such as poverty and food insecurity that disproportionately impact youth.This presentation will explore adultism’s micro and macro mental health impacts on health, illness, treatment, and training - and challenge the audience, those who identify as CAPs and perhaps even more importantly those who do not, to reconceptualize the work of child psychiatry.

In his seminal book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) claimed that dreams are an attempt to fulfil primitive, emotionally-charged wishes that become disinhibited during sleep, and that they do so in order to preserve the state of sleep. He claimed that this is achieved because dreaming entails a diversion of motivational impulses away from the motor systems (which are paralysed during sleep) and a regression of them onto the perceptual systems. This gives rise to a fulfilment of the wish in hallucinatory fashion – that is, in virtual reality, instead of actual reality. Freud claimed also that the hallucinatory wish-fulfilment is disguised and censored, the purpose of which is also to protect sleep (to prevent anxiety, etc.). After Freud’s death in 1939, a succession of discoveries between the 1950s and 1970s about the brain basis of dreaming called all of these assertions into serious question. However, a second wave of discoveries starting in the 1990s and continuing to the present day, suggest that Freud might have been right after all. This talk will summarise the neuroscientific evidence for and against Freud’s dream theory, and conclude that we seem to owe Freud an apology.

This presentation was originally reviewed on February 7, 2023, and broadcast live online on February 8, 2023, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET.