Master Series in Clinical Practice

Co-sponsors: The Continuing Education Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Major Teaching Hospital of Harvard Medical School; Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; and William James College.

The Master Series affords the chance to spend a complete day with leaders in our field to consider the unique perspective each speaker brings to the challenging dilemmas in both theory and practice. We hope that you will consider joining us for the entire series at a reduced tuition or choose the programs most relevant to your own practice.

Nassir Ghaemi, MD and Edward Mendelowitz, PhD, instructors

Clinical practice of psychotherapy often entails interaction with the use of psychotropic medications.  Though prescribed by psychiatrists or other physicians, the role and impact of psychotropic medications on clients cannot be ignored by the non-prescribing mental health professional.  For clinical psychologists and social workers, familiarity with psychotropic drugs is relevant to their clinical practice.  Sometimes, mental health professionals may observe symptoms or side effects that are important to bring to the attention of prescribers.  Sometimes mental health professionals may make diagnostic judgments or obtain diagnostic information that may be important for prescribers.  Sometimes non-prescribing mental health professionals may not agree with the diagnoses or treatment decisions of prescribers.  In all these cases, non-prescribing mental health professionals should advocate for their clients, and seek to collaborate with prescribers for their clients’ benefit.   The workshop will also address psychological and social aspects of deciding to take medications, or not to take them, leading to undertreatment and overtreatment.   This workshop will provide basic knowledge about psychotropic drug classes, their benefits and harms, and their typical uses for clinical indications.  Some clinical controversies, like antidepressant-related suicidality or amphetamine-related neurotoxicity, will be explored.

Specific learning objectives:

1. Discuss psychological and social aspects of undertreatment and overtreatment with psychotropic medications.

2. Describe main drug classes, their benefits and harms.

3. Explain when and how to interact with prescribers regarding symptoms, side effects, and diagnostic aspects of clinical prescribers

Program Code: MS96

6 CE/CME Credits

Location: William James College, Newton

S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD MPH, is Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, and Director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. He also is a Clinical Lecturer at Harvard Medical School.   He is a psychiatric researcher with expertise in depression and bipolar disorder, and has Masters’ degrees in philosophy from Tufts and in public health from Harvard.  He has authored over half a dozen books, over 200 scientific articles or book chapters, and serves as Associate Editor of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica and as Founding Editor of The Psychiatry Letter, a monthly newsletter for mental health clinicians.

Ed Mendelowitz, PhD, completed his doctoral studies at the California School of Professional Psychology where he worked closely with Rollo May. He is on the board of editors for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and the Humanistic Psychologist and a contributor to some of the major compendiums of existential-humanistic thought and praxis. He has presented numerous papers on psychology, psychotherapy and their interrelations with the broader humanities in the USA, Canada, Europe, and East Asia. His work resides on the gnostic frontiers of psychology in its poetic blending of art, literature, music, cinema, religion, philosophy and clinical narrative. His collage-like Ethics and Lao-tzu has been called “an extraordinary moral narrative” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Robert Coles and “a compendium of wisdom” by the late psychoanalyst and author Allen Wheelis. Dr. Mendelowitz is on the faculty of Saybrook University and a lecturer at Tufts Medical Center and writes a quarterly online column, Humanitas, for the Society of Humanistic Psychology. He is the recipient of the Rollo May Award, bestowed by the Society for Humanistic Psychology (Div. 32 of the APA) for “independent and outstanding pursuit of new frontiers in humanistic psychology.”