Full Course Description

Therapy in a Post-Pandemic World: How to Help Your Anxious Clients & Safely Re-Open Your Office

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Analyze ways to address clients’ anxiety and worry around COVID-19 based on the latest evidence.
  2. Analyze the specific ways in which mental health professionals can help clients understand and make their own decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic.
  3. Determine strategies for safely re-opening offices for clients.
  4. 3 key things that mental health professionals should understand about COVID-19 and its biopsychosocial impacts.
  5. Conduct assessment of stress levels in children coping with online learning and pandemic realities.
  6. Analyze what we are learning about critical stress points in parents and children during the pandemic.
  7. Utilize at least 6 practical stress management coping skills for parents, caretakers and kids.
  8. Determine needs for higher levels of care, medical referrals, and school resources.

Outline

What Therapists Should Know for Clients worried about COVID-19

  • Sorting fact from fiction and understanding the numbers 
  • Assessing the risks of serious illness
  • Strategies for mitigating risk to yourself and your clients in your clinical work
  • How to understand vaccination and what it means
Bringing Clients Back to Your Office Safely
  • Setting up your office
  • Understanding ventilation strategies
  • Re-examining how you schedule clients
  • The utility of wearing masks or not wearing masks in the office
  • Properly understanding what COVID-19 testing can and can’t do
Helping Clients Navigate Decision Making
  • Safety vs social isolation – assessing the risks and benefits to client well-being on their diagnosis
  • Helping clients cope when others don’t agree or reciprocate the way they are choosing to lower their risk of getting sick
  • Prioritizing robust support systems, marriages, and friends
Understanding the Specific Stressors Parents, Kids, and Families are Facing
  • Why guilt is an under-recognized stressor among parents and how to work with it
  • Dis-enfranchised grief and and loss
  • Loss of control - working with problems that can’t be solved right now
  • What anger is really all about in this time
  • How anxiety and fear are taking on new meaning in this time
  • The long-term effects of isolation and how to lower the risks
Six Techniques to Help Improve Home & Family Life for Clients
  • How to lower expectations without falling behind
  • How and why family meetings have new meaning going forward. Discussing what’s going on with your family.
  • What isolation has done to our bodies – incorporating exercise and movement is more important than ever
  • Media exposure is doing more than you might think
  • control over media exposure, choosing how we discuss the virus and our mitigation efforts
  • Specific sleep recommendations and the power of routines
Addressing the BIG Long-Term Impacts of the Pandemic among Parents, Families, and their Kids
  • The long-term effects of 2020-2021 on social and emotional development
  • Ways you can improve remote learning or hybrid learning
  • How kids might be displaying anxiety in different ways today and how to help
  • Fostering a growth mindset even after a difficult year
Where We Are Headed – What Life & Therapy Looks Like Post-Pandemic
  • Data from previous global pandemics
  • Longer-term issues that will surface you should know about right now
  • The ways our clients will need help as we re-orient in a new normal

Target Audience

  • Counselors
  • Psychologists
  • Social Workers
  • Marriage & Family Therapists
  • Psychiatrists
  • Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner
  • Addictions Counselors

Copyright : 02/08/2021