Framing and Sustaining the Use of Mindfulness Meditation in Clinical Care
Recent treatment approaches for anxiety and depressive disorders stress the importance of addressing transdiagnostic factors such as rumination, worry, and impulsivity as part of comprehensive intervention. Mindfulness meditation has shown the ability to reduce these factors, along with enhancing clinical outcomes through increased tolerance of negative affective states. This presentation will be an interactive learning experience combining didactic instruction with experiential exercises to teach the key aspects of mindfulness meditation and its use in psychotherapy. We will focus on how features of mindfulness training can be incorporated into routine clinical settings and address misconceptions about mindfulness meditation that can be barriers to clients’ engaging in the practice, for example, that it is simply about relaxing or emptying the mind.
Speaker Bio:
Zindel V. Segal, Ph.D., C.Psych, is Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a co-founder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Zindel’s latest book Better in Every Sense describes the vital role of sensory awareness in helping people step out of unhelpful mental routines and his TEDx talk advocating for the relevance of mindfulness-based clinical care in psychiatry and mental health has over 1 million views.