Mind-Brain-Gene: Toward Psychotherapy Integration

1.5 CPD hours

This webinar synthesizes the substantial literature on psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics, combining it with the neuroscience of emotional, interpersonal, cognitive, dynamics, with psychotherapeutic approaches to offer an integrated vision of psychotherapy.  The integrative model promotes a conceptual shift in how we understand mental health problems and their solutions.  We can now understand how the immune system, diet, brain structure, and even gut bacteria effect mental health.  Psychotherapists in the 21^st Century will by necessity become more like healthcare workers to address and resolve adverse mind-body-brain interactions.

Mind-Brain-Gene explores a wide variety of factors having multidirectional causal relationships between stress, depression, anxiety, the immune system, and gene expression.  The interaction between all these factors has been by illuminated by studies examining the effects of life style factors on the incidence of health and psychological problems.  There are significant relationships between immune system function, stress, insecure attachment, anxiety, depression, poor nutrition, bad quality sleep, physical inactivity, and neurophysiological dysregulation.  For example, insecure attachment, deprivation, and child abuse contribute to anxiety and depression as well as immune system dysregulation in far more extensive ways than was believed.  This complex range of health conditions effects millions of people who seek psychotherapy.

Just as the field of medicine has been recently transformed by Functional and Integrative Medicine, psychotherapy by necessity is moving toward integration.  Given that psychotherapy will increasingly address health factors, with epigenetics and psychoneuroimmunology at the forefront, this integration brings those fields of research that had previously been compartmentalized into a robust vision of psychotherapy.  Mind-Brain-Gene applies this approach to psychological problems and evidence-based practices tailed to ameliorating anxiety and depression.

Learning objectives

Particpants will be able to:

• Contrast: The overly compartmental field of psychotherapy of the 20^th Century to the integrative vision of psychotherapy in the 21^st Century

• Distinguish: Between various health conditions and psychological disorders and their overlap

• Explain: Explain how poor health contributes to poor mental health as well as visa versa

• Analyze: How an overactive immune system contributes to depression and anxiety

• Evaluate: How adverse childhood experiences contributes to long-term chronic health and mental health conditions and what to do about it.

• Plan: Where to encourage lifestyle changes that improve health and mental health

• Measure: The effect of poor sleep, diet, and lack of exercise contributions to changes in mental health

• Choose: What psychotherapeutic intervention to use for various psychological conditions

• Assess: The effects of various psychotherapeutic interventions

• Select: Brain-based and evidence-based approaches with the most practical outcomes

• Formulate: A treatment plan most appropriate for the individual based on her/his ethnicity, socio-economic position, and LGBTQ identification.