Thursday, 22 June
12:45-14:00
Location: Prado

Session (21)

• Living our Values and Embracing Our Vulnerabilities in Graduate School and Beyond
Clare Kennedy Purvis, Psy.D., Lantern

Attendees at this conference are deeply committed to ACT and work to embrace psychological flexibility in our personal and professional lives. But how do we as a field and a community support graduate-level trainees and early career professionals in this same endeavor? Trainees face constant evaluation, competition and pressure in their graduate programs. As training progresses and we enter post-doc and first jobs, the race to the top often intensifies. If our community strives to build a culture of openness, authenticity, and flexibility, what steps can we take to support training environments where graduate students feel empowered to embrace their vulnerabilities and choose values-based actions? This talk will explore personal experiences of trainees and early career professionals who showed up in their professional contexts "warts and all," and will offer calls to action for this community to contribute to cultivating ACT-consistent cultures in our own professional and training environments.

• Lovism: A CBS-Based Life-stance
Alan Pogrebinschi, MSc., Private practice

Today, intolerance, hate and extremism are dangerously on the rise, especially in western societies where many thought those were ailments of the past. It may seem we're living an epidemic of psychological inflexibility! If that is so, how can we use CBS to steer our world towards a healthier course? Psychotherapy arguably doesn’t have the required bandwidth and traditional prevention programs usually depend on the very governments that are now falling into the hands of extremists. A bottom-up approach is warranted. We introduce Lovism, a CBS-based life-stance. Our aim is to develop an evolving self-sustaining and self-replicating social technology that consistently increases levels of psychological flexibility of those touched by it.

• The Words Don't Work
Jim Lucas, Private Practice & University of Birmingham, UK

Many of the words used to explain human suffering don't work, because they often do more harm than good. A tightly held biological view creates a context that has significant negative effects for research, service delivery and personal well-being. The biological explanation has been shown to increase stigma and prejudice.
When words are used to label experiences as illnesses and disorders, they function to incite responses based on attempts to fix, correct or cure. But what if there is nothing to fix? A response in this context looks very different and may provide some more workable alternatives.
The speaker will describe his own mistakes in using acts that don't work. He'll speak of how the acts, even when well-intentioned, function to create discord rather than harmony. I hope to support people to act mindfully so that we can remain curious about others and be courageous with our selves.

• Bridging the Gap Between Us and Them: About Stigmatization in Mental Health Practice
K L Helmus, Psychologist

In this short presentation you will be introduced into the subject of stigmatization and how act based interventions can be helpful in the process towards openness and understanding in clinical practice. It will be based on a tedX talk was held by the presenter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSdf53uz5Hw in Dutch, with English subtitles). This fresh and hopefully inspiring IGNITE talk will be held in English.
The theoretical base:
Stigmatization can have negative consequences for people with mental disorders. Studies in mental health care settings indicate that professionals frequently display stigmatizing attitudes and behaviour towards clients. Continuum beliefs about mental disorders, i.e. the belief that mental health problems are continuous with normal mentation, are associated with less stigmatizing attitudes. This is opposed to the belief that there is a dichotomous distinction between ‘us’ the healthy and ‘them’ the ill group. Training professionals in continuum beliefs about mental disorders is expected to reduce stigmatizing attitudes. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of a contact intervention on stigmatizing attitudes and continuum beliefs of mental health professionals working with people with (severe) mental disorders.

• Reducing Patients' Self-Stigma Through Their Mental Health Care Professionals
Marilon Van Doorn, University of Utrecht

Where the mental health care is aiming to be a place aimed at improvement or recovery, a significant percentage of mental health care professionals are suggested to have stigmatizing attitudes towards patients. More than 20% of reported patients stigmatization experiences take place in contact with mental health care professionals. When an individual considers a stigma as just, it can be internalised, so called self-stigmatization. Several meta-analyses on the effectiveness of interventions for diminishing self-stigmatization in psychiatric patients have been published, however results vary.The meta-analyses also address the intriguing issue whether interventions addressing self-stigmatization is not a form of stigmatization itself; suggesting that deviation of patients could be implicitly emphasized. If this is indeed the case, finding an effective direct intervention to reduce self-stigmatization would be challenging. A alternative approach, via mental health care professionals might reduce that risk.
A logical next step in diminishing self-stigmatization, mental health care professionals in this study were offered a workshop based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy aimed at changing the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ thinking of the participating participants and via that influencing self-stigmatization of their patients.
The central question of the study is whether self-stigmatization of patients will decline through their mental health care professionals. In this study it is expected that self-stigmatization of patients will be reduced when their mental health care professional has participated in an ACT-based workshop. To our knowledge, this study will be the first randomized control trial to address self-stigmatization through ACT.

• Your Therapist Doesn't Feels Like a Fraud? You Should Look for Another Professional!
Giovanni Pergher, MS, Faculdades Integradas de Taquara

This presentation is based on a chronicle written by the author based on his experiences as a clinician, supervisor and human being. As implicit in the title, I suggest that a good therapist will invariable feels like a fraud. More specifically, I propose that the two main characteristics of a good therapist are the ones that will make the professional feels like a hoax. The two characteristics are 1) having an open mind for new knowledge relevant for improving his practice and 2) the capacity to put himself in the client's shoes in a deep sense. This features bring a sense of being a fraud because 1) with an open mind you'll get in touch with new interesting ideas that may contradict your previous convictions about the "right" way to help your clients and 2) the only way to connect with the client's pain in a real deep sense is by feeling pain yourself, which will raise the question "How can I help this person since I feel the same pain"?

• Designing a Digital ACT-Based Intervention: Things I have learned 

Orestis Kasinopoulos, Ph.D student, University of Cyprus
Maria Karekla, Ph.D., University of Cyprus

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that clinic-based, face-to-face interventions can be effectively used to treat sufferers of mental health and chronic health conditions. The increasing demands for cost reduction for services in the healthcare system and obstacles regarding physical access to treatment highlight the need for innovative, cost-reducing, self-management interventions. Digital interventions might present with feasible means to overcome many barriers and improve health care for persons with mental or health problems in the convenience of their space and time. Digital interventions, however, come with a few challenges. Firstly, a significantly higher proportion of participants often fail to adhere to online interventions. Secondly, effective planning and designing of a digital intervention involves numerous pitfalls and strategies to overcome them - from learning to speak the programmer's language to becoming an expert in audiovisual editing. This presentation aims to prepare and inform researchers aiming to explore the world of digital interventions through a personal journey of experience.

• TangOrient: Mindfulness and Therapeutic Innovation
Haneen Tamari,B.A, Dip., M. Sc., University of Toronto & Ryerson University

Some years ago, the presenter moved to Toronto, Canada. As a new Canadian, she strived to heal and recover from past displacement and ached to feel rooted in an unfamiliar city and country. While feeling disoriented, she discovered Argentinean Tango. The act of learning tango required commitment and mindfulness. Years later, she discovered by happenstance how much more she enjoyed the same dance when the music was from cultures closer to those of her own origins; an unconventional substitute for widely known tango music. Together with learning about ACT, she chose to develop an idea called TangOrient, or the dance of contextual music and re-ORIENTation. Would-be dancers can learn the rules of traditional Argentinian Tango while abiding to music to which one's heart connects. Today, in a world of ever-increasing forced displacement, the presenter believes it's important to explore cultivating therapeutic innovation, locally and sustainably. While the presenter is not an ACT therapist, she is willing to dig deeper to understand cultural layers in her local community. The presenter's proposed TangOrient philosophy calls on ACT to involve community members to support sustainable healing in local communities by connecting sensitively and contextually with sociocultural peers. In other words, the presentation makes the case that ACT practitioners might use the metaphor of “tango dancing to the client’s own music” as a way to assist clients with finding inspiration close to their source of well being even as time-honoured dance steps are learned and a fledgling acceptance of displacement is gained.

• Building Community Through Mindfulness and Committed Action
Annette Dufresne, PhD, CPsych., Private Practice

In this presentation, I will share my own journey in putting my values into action by starting to build community with individuals interested in practicing mindfulness. The journey began with offering group mindfulness practice, and expanded to include sharing a potluck meal and experiencing elements of mindful eating. The community broadened through word of mouth. Committed action became part of the culture of the community through free-will donations, with funds donated to local charitable organizations selected by the group. How similar activities can be used to help rebalance the negativity we are exposed to at a societal level on a daily basis will be explored.

• Just My Imagination: My Journey from OCD Patient to Therapist
Michael Blumberg, MA, LCPC, Glenview Counseling Group

I began my journey into madness at age 11 and had fully arrived there by 21. My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder spun it's web of lies into every empty second of my consciousness. Whether it was scrupulosity, harm obsessions, symmetry, contamination or any other false framework, I was overtaken by it. And then, just as it became completely debilitating, I asked for help. That is when the next chapter of my life began; the chapter whereby I crawled out from under OCD's crushing weight, lifted it above my head, and cast it into oblivion.
Now, as a clinician specializing in the treatment of OCD, I help other cast off the yoke of OCD and live the lives they want to live.

• ACT in Sex-therapy
Charlotte Makboul, Private Practice

The ignite will describe how to work with sexual issues such as erectal disorder or sexual desire disorders in an ACT- and mindfulnessbased psychotherapy. How to find values to follow, thougts to defuse and how to learn to expand uncomfortable feelings during sex to make the body more cooperative and functional.

• Four Paths to Wholeness
Marianela Medrano, Palabra Counseling Center

The main focus of this presentation is to demonstrate the effectiveness of writing based on mindfulness, to create a cognitive / experiential bridge or nexus that can clarify the usefulness or uselessness of our thoughts, feelings and actions in terms of whether they lead us or not to live a full and consistent life with our values. This presentation emphasizes how the use of writing has helped me to facilitate psychological flexibility in order to reduce human suffering.These are the four paths with which I facilitate an approach to the six main processes of ACT (psychological flexibility): First Path: Inhabit the House of the Self (The Here and Now, Acceptance, Values); Second Path: Cultivate and Preserve Goodness to the Self (Self-Compassion); Third Path: Use discernment to understand our history (Self as context, De-fusing); Fourth Path: Practice transformative thinking and write! (Commitment).