Attendees of APA's 2010 Annual Convention will be flying home with more than pilfered pens and hotel shampoo. Here's a sampling of what psychologists and students took from this year's meeting.
"Seeing so many people gathered together around shared interests inspires me at every APA convention I've come to!"
-- Suzi Marie Clark, Clarion University
"A thought that inspired me was that we need to have more detailed research as far as looking at each population and comorbidity, in order to treat them better."
-- Dorothy Reinagel, Alliant International University
As so many of the presidential programming sessions at this year's APA Annual Convention have already emphasized, caregiving is a responsibility that will touch almost all of us at some point in our lives. And with an aging population and so many people caring for ill and disabled children and young adults, the need for help from psychologists on reducing the stresses on family caregivers across the lifespan will only continue to grow.
In response to this need, APA President Carol Goodheart, PhD, convened the APA Presidential Task Force on Caregivers in the spring of 2009. The culmination of their work on the issue of caregiving will be revealed in early 2011 with the launch of the web-based APA Family Caregiver Briefcase for Psychologists. At a session Saturday, Goodheart and the other task-force members provided a glimpse into several of the components of the briefcase, including:
Facts and figures about family caregiving and common caregiving problems
Tips on how to reach caregivers
Assessment and intervention strategies and tools
Information on conducting caregiver research
Advice on addressing the needs of culturally diverse groups
Clinicians now have an interactive, online forum where they can find, share and discuss resources and useful web sites on anxiety, dementia, postpartum depression and other topics relevant to their practices. Part social networking site, part community bulletin board, PsycLINK is a wiki platform "by psychologists, for psychologists," aimed at helping clinicians easily find the information they need to help their patients and improve their practices, said Jeffrey Zimmerman, PhD, who demonstrated PsycLINK on Saturday during APA's 2010 Annual Convention in San Diego.
People struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder who haven't responded to conventional treatments, lifelong smokers, patients with terminal cancer and even the mentally and physically healthy have all shown therapeutic benefits in controlled experiments with hallucinogens, psychology and medical researchers reported at a symposium Saturday.
Working with a group of participants given psilocybin derived from mushrooms, Roland Griffiths, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that months later, 80 percent of subjects reported the experience as one of the five most spiritually significant of their entire lives, and continued to feel improvements in mood and behavior.
Young people today are bombarded with messages about sex from the media, advertising and their peers. Unfortunately, one message they're often not hearing is how to make their own healthy decisions about sex. Researchers at APA's Annual Convention shared some of the latest research on what affects those messages and how parents and teachers can do more to help adolescents make better decisions.
Contrary to most polls, America is not the world's most overweight nation, not by a long shot: that distinction goes to the South Pacific island of Nauru. America? It's number 20 on the list. So why the discrepancy? Dr. Esther Rothblum of San Diego State University thinks she knows the answer, which she outlined today in her invited address "It's Time to Throw Our Weight Around: The New Field of Fat Studies": Jenny Craig wants us to think we're the kings of cholesterol.
And Ms. Craig is serious about it -- after all, in 1995, she, along with Slim Fast and a raft of other diet food companies, fired the opening salvo in the War on Obesity. Now, 15 years later, Rothblum is fighting back. Dubbing her counter-offensive "Fat Studies", she is pushing back on discrimination based on body weight.
My husband and I don't have living wills - those instructions specifying what actions should be taken for our health in the event that we are no longer able to make decisions due to illness or incapacity. We've talked about our wishes informally but have mostly left it at that. It turns out we're not alone, according to social psychologist Peter Ditto, PhD, of the Unviersity of California, Irvine, who says only about 25 percent of Americans have some kind of living will or advance directive in place. He presented several of his research findings today at a presentation titled "Is the Living Will Dead?"
Here we are in the middle of hurricane season, citizens in the Gulf Coast are still contending with the BP oil spill and a series of fires, rain storms, workplace shootings and earthquakes affecting regions across the U.S. and around the world. There’s no better time than now for Disaster Mental Health training.
Saturday, during APA’s 2010 San Diego convention, psychologists and other mental health professionals are participating in a special abbreviated version of the American Red Cross (ARC) Foundations of Disaster Mental Health. This training is available on rare occasion (national meeting of a national partner or as needed in the aftermath of a large-scale disaster). Sponsored by APA’s Disaster Response Network (DRN) program, the San Diego American Red Cross chapter, and APA Division 56 – Trauma Psychology the training is designed to prepare first time, independently licensed Disaster Mental Health (DMH) workers to deploy to disaster relief operations.
In a meeting room of the Manchester Grand Hyatt it's a battle of the brains for a group of high school students representing eight countries in the International Brain Bee.
At the end of the daylong neuroscience-focused competition, one student will be named winner, taking home a prize that includes a $3,000 college scholarship. Winners will be announced at about 5 p.m. today in the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel, Elizabeth Ballroom B.
"The ultimate purpose of the competition is to fight psychological and neurological disorders throughout the world," said competition founder and director Norbert Myslinski, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. "But the shorter-term goal is to motivate high school students to learn about the brain and inspire them to consider careers in psychology and neuroscience."
There's a wealth of data on adolescent suicide, and numerous programs and interventions designed to prevent it. But what about even younger children? In 2006, 56 children under the age of 12 committed suicide -- about one per week. And there's a staggering lack of research into suicide among kids this young. As a first step toward addressing that problem, a panel convened at APA's Annual Convention to share with audience members what's currently known, what still needs further research, and what can be done about it.
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