Working with People Facing Severe and Persistent Problems

Cost

$260 for two days of training or $280 if earning 12 APA Approved CE credits from Union Institute & University.

Finding Our Way Forward

When we are working with people who are dealing with serious and relentless problems or mental health challenges, at times we can feel discouraged and as if we are offering virtually no help to the person who is suffering—we can even feel like giving up. Sometimes we can feel additionally burdened by conflicting clinical and bureaucratic demands. At these times, we can be helped by narrative practices that help us to accurately discern what difference we are making in the person’s life and to reconnect us with values, practices and communities that can sustain us in finding our way forward.

This is a workshop where you can bring your hardest questions about the work that you find most challenging and get help with providing long-term treatment of long-term problems. Over these two days, SuEllen Hamkins will guide a small group of participants in reflecting on and getting support to freshly engage in their work with people facing tenacious problems, such as long-term psychiatric symptoms. She will provide some examples of her work, interview several participants about their work using a reflecting team, and guide participants in interviewing one another to foster hope and open up new possibilities for challenging therapeutic situations.

The Rich Palette of Narrative Practices

In this workshop, SuEllen will help you make the most of the rich palette of narrative practices available to us. She will support you to gently persist in deconstructing persistent problems and to attend with more nuance to values and skills that are absent but implicit. Drawing on the insights of narrative psychiatry, she will guide you in cultivating a person’s sense of agency when using psychotropic medicines or in dismantling cultural discourses that contribute to the chronicity of problems, such as those accompanying diagnoses of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder.Quick, doable ways to create therapeutic documents to support the re-telling of new narratives and practical methods to extend audiences to promote wider circulation of positive new identity developments will be described. Throughout, SuEllen will help us continually attend to cultivating ongoing emotional attunement and a collaborative
therapeutic alliance.

Replenishing The Spirit of the Work

In addition to fostering creativity in narrative practice, this workshop is designed to replenish us as therapists and reconnect us with the values and communities that inspire and sustain us. In addition to offering support to one another in the workshop, we will explore how we might each continue to take care of ourselves in ways that are consonant with our values as clinicians and to cultivate communities of support for ourselves once we return home.

Workshop Presenter

SuEllen Hamkins, MD, is a psychiatrist and author. Her passion is helping people cultivate their values and strengths in the face of challenges and difficulties. Her work centers on three main areas: narrative psychiatry, college student mental health and mother-daughter relationships. She is Assistant Director of the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. SuEllen is a co-founder of the Mother-Daughter Project, and has created a series of videos on helping mothers and daughter thrive. Watch this video to learn more about her most recent book, The Art of Narrative Psychiatry, published by Oxford University Press.