Dept. of Psychology - Workshop with Dr. Stefan Hofmann

Clinical psychology is in crisis. Although some progress has been made, the efficacy of our therapies and development of our models have been limited. To overcome this crisis, we need a radical departure from the latent disease model of the current psychiatric nosology of the DSM/ICD and the absurd proliferation of the protocols-for-syndrome approach. Process-based therapy (PBT) offers a new perspective. It focuses on how to best target and change core biopsychosocial processes in a specific situation for given goals with a given client. This approach recognizes that psychotherapy typically involves non-linear (rather than linear), bidirectional (rather than unidirectional), and dynamic changes of many (rather than only a few) interconnected variables. Effective therapy changes the entire system toward a stable and adaptive state. For therapy to be most effective, we, therefore, need to embrace a systematic, assessment-guided, and theory-based approach to understand the relationships of the various problems of a given client. PBT organizes psychological processes of change into six dimensions: cognition, affect, attention, self, motivation and overt behavior. Several important processes of change combine two or more of these dimensions. Tailoring intervention strategies to target the appropriate processes in a given individual would be a major advance in psychiatry and an important step toward precision medicine. Functional analysis, the foundation of behavior therapy, provides the basis to understand these relationships. PBT acknowledges the complexity, inter-relatedness, and multidimensional levels of the problems in a given client. In essence, PBT offers a new paradigm for clinical science: Gathering high-density longitudinal idiographic data to capture the complexity of psychopathology using a dynamic network approach within the general framework of evolutionary science.

Details:

1:00 - 5:00PM - Workshop

Located in La Cité - Room 215

Parking information will be sent out to those who register. Thank you!