Clinicians and Students

 

Master Clinician Lecture Series: Complexity

There is an ongoing dialectic between simplicity and complexity, and in clinical work we have to keep an eye on working toward the simplicity that comes with deep understanding while at the same time holding on to nuance and complexity. This new lecture series will focus on deepening our work with a particular eye on complexity. We will look for areas of clinical work where we might want to extend our understanding.

This series meets on the second Monday of every month, from 10:00 – 11:30. It is meant for experienced, licensed therapists, but all are welcome.

MCLS: Lee Rodin

It's time once again for the Master Clinician Lecture Series. This time Lee Rodin will be presenting Beyond Labels: A Holistic Approach to Neuro-Development. HANDLE (Holistic Approach to NeuroDevelopment and Learning Efficiency) is an approach that addresses issues at...

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MCLS: Dr. Martinez

It's time for the next installment in the Master Clinician Lecture Series! The purpose of this series is to explore complexity in its various forms as we all strive to become masters of clinical work. This month, I will be leading the discussion. The topic is Layers...

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MCLS: Dr. Varona

Although I did not post the announcement, we did have Dr. Alberto Varona of the Adler School of Psychology come to speak last Monday, 8/8. His talk, "The Whole AND the Sum of its Parts: Introducing the clinical complexity model of Joseph Palombo" was a reminder of how...

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Consult Group: Psychodynamics and Cognitions

Dr. Jay Einhorn and I are organizing a time-limited consultation group focused on integrating psychodynamic and cognitive methods within a brain-based model. This is a four-session workshop on the integration of psychodynamic and cognitive approaches to understanding...

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MCLS: Dr. Glader

This Monday, July 11, 2016, Dr. Glader will present at the Master Clinician Lecture Series on her work with what she calls Spunky Gifted Kids. A population that is often neglected in training programs for counselors, these kids require a different kind of engagement...

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Read more recent posts at my blog.

Resources for Students

There are many websites online to assist in various aspects of research.

Software for Qualitative Analysis: The University of Surrey maintains a helpful website about the various software packages for assisting in qualitative data analysis, providing guidance for determining which is the appopriate software for your research needs.

Statistics: If you look around online, you can find many tutorials and online statistical calculators for those with various levels of statistical know-how. To start with, UCLA has a table to help you determine which statistical tool might be appropriate for your research; the university also has several statistical seminars available in using statistical software as well as performing more advanced statistical analyses.

Publicly available data: There are many data sets that are publicly available, allowing you to ask complex questions of fairly large data sets, many of which have decades of data. To do complicated statistics, you will need a statistical software package such as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) or STATA. You can find a working list of data sets here.

IRB:

Loyola’s Institutional Review Board has many helpful resources, including a site to determine whether you need IRB approval as well as information about consent and sample consent forms.

University of Chicago SSA Institutional Review Board also has sample consent forms.

Class Handouts:

ResearchFlowChart This flow chart outlines some of the choices made in designing empirical research studies; the material draws from Rubin and Babbie as well as Tyson’s research textbooks, in addition to other sources.

Other resources:

Loyola University Chicago maintains an online guide for scholarship in social work; it is a valuable starting place for research and writing.

There are often public radio and other media stories relevant to research. This American Life aired an episode with a segment about research into community practices around talking about HIV and AIDS, which is a good example of how different approaches to gathering data can result in different data. The segment begins at about 19:00 into this episode on gossip, and is about 15 minutes long.

Radiolab, which often has segments related to research, recently aired a short episode about a problem with replicating results in research, based on one researcher’s experience that effect sizes shrink over time. The entire episode, called Cosmic Habituation, is worth listening to. More recently, Radiolab had an episode on why people do bad things, and the first segment is about Stanley Milgram‘s famous experiment on electric shocks and a deconstruction of the common interpretation about following orders, and is worth listening to. In the context of research, this experiment often comes up in a discussion of maintaining ethical research practice.

Cognitive Integrative Perspective was developed by Sharon Berlin as a way to move cognitive theory forward to include the fundamental worldview of social work (i.e. a recognition of the importance of, and willingness to intervene in, a person’s environment) as well as what we now know about neurobiology.

This approach to clinical work shares theoretical ground with the following theories, each of which you might want to read more about if you find CI compelling:

Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz)
Self-Schema Therapy (Jeffrey Young)
In IFS and self-schema therapy you should recognize the idea of multiple selves and possible selves.
Spiritual Self-Schema Therapy (S. Kelly Avants and Arthur Margolin) 3-S therapy also has the concept of multiple selves, though it places it in the context of Buddhist philosophy, which makes it similar in some ways to DBT and mindsight.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (Marsha Linehan)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl, and Kelly Wilson)
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, John Teasdale)
Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (Sarah Bowen, Neha Chawla, and Joel Grow)
DBT, ACT, MBCT, and MBRP integrate mindfulness into traditional cognitive therapy
Mindsight (Dan Siegel) integrates mindfulness and neurobiology; although he doesn’t have a website dedicated to clinical theory, Allan Schore’s work on developmental neuroscience and psychoanalysis is also related.

The National Association of Social Workers has a publication regarding its guidelines for cultural competence. The Office of MInority Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, addresses issues of health disparities across minority groups and gives this definition of cultural competence.

However, cultural competence is not a straightforward construct; inherent within it are conceptualizations of race, ethnicity and culture that may not be univerally applicable. This is the topic in the chapter I wrote for Stanley Witkin’s book, Narrating Social Work Through Autoethnography.

Understanding human development is necessarily based in some theoretical understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to develop. In addition to books that give a strong foundational understanding of some key Western theorists of human development (e.g. Joan Berzoff and Joseph Palombo both describe multiple theories of development and mind), George Mason University has a website for developmental psychology that lists links to sites related to development. As a rough draft study guide, Development Chart is a table that includes several theoretical lines of development to compare.