Mike Langlois, LICSW
Practice News
Updates for Colleagues
December, 2010 - Vol 1, Issue 4
In This Issue
Alice Miller in Memoriam
Social Gaming
Informatics
Tweet Deal
Tetris Treatment
New E-Course
Tech and Education and Prizes!
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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

Alice Miller and the Enlightened Witness
Alice MillerThere 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!
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!
Tetris as Cognitive Vaccine with PTSD

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.
Learn at Home E-Course for Quicker, Gentler Phone Calls with Insurance Companies.
PhoneSign 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!



Free Journal on Emerging Technology in Learning and Your Holiday Reward! :-)
geek gift
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!


Sincerely,
Mike Langlois, LICSW