Getting to know the person who comes to us for help is the foundation for all that we do as healing professionals. The way we answer the questions of how to integrate our direct experience of the client, our intuitive knowing, and accumulated clinical wisdom so that we have the language and categories to conceptualize and understand our client’s problems, communicate with the client as well as other professionals, and formulate our treatment objectives directly impacts our ability to be an effective professional. Combining empirical and rational approaches with our inner knowing, our innate sensitivity and our capacity to be present with another is an art that must be grounded in our concrete experience of our client, and for that reason this course emphasizes case studies and the students own experiences in formal and informal relationships. We also examine the controversies over the increasing number of diagnostic categories, medicalization of non-extreme behaviors, and influence of the pharmaceutical industry in the DSM5; look into debates over what is normal behavior, what is pathological and the accuracy and utility of certain diagnostic categories; and explore the value of insights from typical assessment strategies to develop our capacity for diagnosis. In addition, we take into account the revolution in psychotherapy and medicine, both of which are integrating eastern understandings with our western tradition, to see how we can best bring together meditative, contemplative and energetic approaches to treatment into our assessments.
- Teacher: Roger Cavnaugh