Practice
News
Updates for Colleagues
December,
2010 - Vol 1, Issue 4
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Greetings! |
This
month I wanted to do something a little different from the standard
"How to handle stress during the holidays" emails. Not because
there isn't a value to those, but because many of you have told me
that you enjoy these newsletters for the info of social media,
technology, gaming & psychotherapy. So this month's newsletter
was created ONLY by Twitter. What I mean by that is that I only
looked for material using the tweets from colleagues I follow.
Every article here was a link in someone's tweet in the past two
weeks.
Many of our colleagues often express contempt prior to
investigation of Twitter. They see it as shallow, narcissistic
texting or they avoid it altogether. There are definitely some
tweets out there that don't bear repeating, but as you sample this
month's selection I hope you'll find these articles meaningful and
useful to you. And if you do, don't thank me.
Thank Twitter.
Take good care,
Mike
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Alice
Miller and the Enlightened Witness |
There are
a handful of psychodynamic thinkers that I think
everyone should read, but Alice Miller is one of
them. Her most famous book, Drama of the Gifted Child has helped
explain the experience of everyday psychic injuries to children for
decades. She had this to say about the obligation to bear
witness to the trauma around us. And that is just scratching the
surface of her website! |
How
You Gonna Keep 'Em Down off the Farmville...? |
Social
Gaming has begun to be even more popular with many than some of the
traditional online or video games, with favorites on Facebook like
Mafia Wars, Farmville, and Bejeweled to name a few. There are
several reasons these games are sticking around, according to this
blog by Ravi Mehta on Mashable.
To give you two, they are embedded in social media, which 75% of
internet users participate in; and they can be fit in with the
daily work/life routines. Mehta explains how these powerful little
games are here to stay! |
Informatics |
Don't let the dry title fool you, there is a lot of
nifty information in the latest newsletter from the Informatics Specialty Interest
Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK. Included
are articles on Avatar Therapy, Information Security and the Web
2.0 Practice, and Training Therapists in Online Therapy, by
OTI's very own
Kate Anthony! |
Need
Supervision? I Can Help!
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I provide f2f and online supervision and you can
find more information on my website. If you want to hear
from people I've worked with, check out my recommendations on
LinkedIn, or email me and I'll send you some references. I work
with you to design what that looks like: Some people have used me
for 1-2 sessions to consult on a gaming case; others set biweekly
or monthly appointments for practice-building and Web 2.0-ifying
their existing practice; and I also offer the traditional weekly
psychodynamic supervision, which is necessary for most independent
licensure. If any of these situations sound like yours, get in
touch and we'll get started in 2011!
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Tetris
as Cognitive Vaccine with PTSD
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Back in college, I should have known I'd end up working as a
gamer-affirmative therapist, given the hours I spent playing
Tetris, a simple yet compelling Russian game that
has stuck around in one form or another for over 20 years. Now
this study by Holmes et al vindicates what many of
us knew all along: Tetris is good for you. Tetris has the
potential to be an effective "cognitive vaccine" against intrusive
flashbacks occurring in people with PTSD. The study compared the
use of Tetris with another computer game (text-based Pub Quiz) and
no-task in 3 groups. Tetris beat out both other groups for Sx
reduction, for up to 4 hours after exposure to the traumatic film
footage. |
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Learn at Home E-Course for Quicker,
Gentler Phone Calls with Insurance Companies. |
Sign up for
my 7 Day E-Course "Reducing Your Stress When Calling Insurance
Companies," and learn many of the ideas and strategies I present at
my workshops. The course arrives in your email daily in 7
"read-with-your-morning-coffee" lessons. You can read them at your
own pace, and whenever you want to, plus print out some of the
graphics that may serve as reminders on how to keep your frame of
mind when making those phone calls. The course is available to you
for $25, and we'll get started whenever you like. Just click the
button below to enroll!
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Free
Journal on Emerging Technology in Learning and Your Holiday Reward!
:-) |

Here's
another goodie for you, this is a free issue of the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in
Learning.
It has articles for those of you who have expressed interest in
learning theory and gaming, and the focus of this
issue is on Serious Games and Creative Learning. Hope you enjoy
it. And as an added bonus to thank you for reading all the way to
the end, I'll help you with your holiday shopping.
For cool gift ideas click on the binary code wrapped gift
to the left, it will take you to ThinkGeek, the answer to ALL your
gift-giving dilemmas! Happy Holidays!
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