Saturday, November 11, 2017

Saturday Morning Keynote Presentation:
Collaborative Care in the Treatment of Eating Disorders Across the Lifespan: Lessons Learned from Research and Practice

The cognitive interpersonal model of eating disorders asserts social-emotional factors not only predispose and maintain eating disordered attitudes and behaviors, but also generate difficulties in interpersonal relationships. These difficulties can confuse concerned caretakers, the most well-meaning of whom can be drawn into unhelpful behaviors, including accommodation and enabling, or emotional outbursts, criticism and denial. Emerging evidence suggests task-sharing interventions and emotion-focused support leads to improved outcomes for patients and caregivers alike. This keynote presentation provides a comprehensive overview of theory, practice, and research on the New Maudsley Model and Emotion-Focused Family Therapy, interventions that offer caregivers the wherewithal to foster genuine change in their loved ones.

SA1 – The Many Faces of ARFID:Let’s Get This Recognized and Treated

Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, or ARFID refers to a patient cohort unable to meet appropriate nutritional and/or energy needs for reasons other than the drive for thinness. This presentation reviews current research about ARFID, and describes contemporary understanding about the its presentation, clinical characteristics, complications, and best treatment practices.

SA2 – Body Justice: Understanding the Intersection of Body Oppression and Social Justice

Sociocultural issues play an important role in the experience of body image. Body justice is a radical perspective that articulates intersections of oppression in the development of body trauma. This workshop explores body justice, offering new perspectives to understand systemic body oppression, and concrete steps to reevaluate limitations in clinical work.

SA3 – Treatment of Binge Eating Disorder and Body Image

Binge eating is a feature of bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. This workshop offers innovative treatment approaches for binge eating disorder, drawing from DBT, interpersonal psychotherapy, guided imagery, and journaling, and including strategies to improve self-regulation and manage energy. A body image program for binge eaters is described.

SA4 – Clinical Intuition to Enhance a Creative Practice: The Beginner’s Mind – Part I

Clinical intuition is a necessary ingredient for change regardless of therapeutic orientation. This presentation explores aspects of clinical intuition, including its neurobiology, and differences between creative spontaneity and impulsive enactment. Tools are offered to help clinicians turn fully into themselves and others, and open up to this particular person in this particular moment.

SA5 – The Embodiment of Interpersonal Neurobiology in the Treatment of ED

Interpersonal neurobiology suggests that eating disorders are characterized by a lack of neural integration resulting in overly rigid and overly chaotic behavior. This presentation describes underlying principles of interpersonal neurobiology and illustrates the importance of using embodied techniques to promote neural integration in adults with eating disorders.

SA6 – Collaborative Care: Increasing Supportive Efforts and Decreasing Therapy-Interfering Behaviors

When clients and their caregivers present as unmotivated, hopeless, angry, or shut down, they create challenges for the most experienced clinicians. This workshop outlines a theoretical framework, and offers specific strategies for resolving therapy-interfering behaviors that arise in caregivers, clinicians, and treatment teams as they struggle to help clients change.

SA7 – Radically Open DBT: Openness, Flexibility, and Connection in Recovery

Radically Open DBT is a treatment approach rooted in the neuroscience of emotional expression and social connectedness, which has shown strong promise in the treatment of anorexia nervosa. This presentation provides an overview of RO-DBT, emphasizing how it helps to facilitate social connectedness and emotional well-being among eating disorder patients.

SA8 – Tackling Taboo Topics with African American Clients

The phrase “Black is Beautiful” can have a significant impact on African American women as they encounter cultural messages that shape self-acceptance, body image and mental health. This workshop explores the impact, as well as the relationship between issues of race, ethnicity, social justice, acculturation, class, sexuality and eating disorders.

SA9 – Medical and Psychological Issues in the Wise Women Years

As many as 15% of women in midlife and beyond struggle with eating disorders. Informed by a biopsychosocial perspective this workshop explores their unique needs and experiences, and illustrates how to integrate physiological and psychological components of treatment in order to provide optimal interdisciplinary care, including in particular, hope for the future.

SA10 – Creative Brain-Based ED Clinical and Nutritional Treatment of ED’s

Eating disorders are severe, biological, brain-based disorders. Research has led to an increased understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying eating disorder symptoms, but there are no interventions that integrate empirical findings into treatment. This workshop introduces new, evidence-based clinical and nutritional treatment tools, and describes how they reflect neurobiological eating disorders research.

SA11 – Clinical Intuition to Enhance a Creative Practice:
Flowering into Wisdom – Part II

Therapeutic wisdom represents the flowering of clinical intuition within a stance of humility, compassion, and non-judgment. This workshop explores the fallacies of common assumptions about clinical expertise, and stresses accepting uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox. Therapists need to maintain self-care and give up the urgency to “fix” problems and “direct” outcomes.

SA12 – Bringing Men to the Table: Research, Practice, and Experience

This workshop provides an overview of research on the classification and epidemiology of body image and eating disorders among men, including the identification of gaps between research and clinical practice. Drawing upon clinical examples, practical tools are offered for identifying males with eating disorders, and developing relevant, appropriate treatment and prevention protocols.