If you have insomnia, you have a number of different behavioral treatment options available. These options offer effective, long-term benefits without the need for sleep aids or ongoing medication. However, you may not know where to go to look for them or which is the right fit for you. In this article, let’s unpack and compare these options to get started.
How much advice should a provider provide, if the provider could provide advice? As behavioral health providers we often, with good intentions, get swept up in a mission of change with (for?) our clients. A client states problems they are experiencing and we clearly see what needs to be “fixed” and jump in with our EBP guns blazing. But perhaps, at times, we are a little too quick on the draw.
Over the last few years, the Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP) has been hard at work developing a first of its kind training for the core components of cognitive behavioral therapy for suicide prevention (CBT-SP). The resulting Second Life Island for Preventing Suicide, or SLIPS, is an asynchronous, avatar-based learning environment focused on reinforcing the concepts learned during traditional two-day CBT-SP workshops.
A few months ago, I was treating a patient with PTSD, but after greater exploration of his distress, which included guilt, shame, and feeling betrayed by his military boss, we fleshed out that moral injury was a salient part of his clinical picture. Currently, there is no consensus in the field on the exact definition of moral injury, but one I like refers to it as “enduring psychosocial and spiritual harms following exposures to high-stakes events that involve transgressions of one’s deeply held moral convictions or beliefs of right and wrong through one’s own or others’ action or inaction, or perceived betrayal by those in positions of authority or trust” (Phelps et al., 2022).
I love to read. Sure, I enjoy learning; but, there are just so many smart, thoughtful, funny, and witty people out there who find ways to say things better than I could ever imagine. Early in my career, I found myself bringing in quotes from my reading to share with my patients - these little nuggets of goodness that made me think of them or a situation we were talking about.