Establishing Whole Person Care
What it is and why it’s important
- How to talk with clients about medical problems
- Facilitating engagement with the client who considers their problem to be only medical
- Social desirability and other challenges in identifying symptoms and stressors
- Collaborative agenda-setting
- Top quality of life domains to address
What Does Grief Have to Do With It?
Psychological distress in the medically ill
- Relationship between medical symptoms, pain, and distress
- Expected manifestations of distress in the context of medical illness
- Factors that increase risk of distress
- Bi-directional relationship distress and illness
- Top screening tools for distress
- The 5 key losses associated with illness
- Working with anticipatory grief
Depression and Anxiety
Are they inevitable after diagnosis of an illness?
- Diagnostic issues when symptoms of disease overlap with signs of depression
- Forms of anxiety that are particularly prevalent in medical illness
- Key assessment tools and techniques
- Barriers to diagnosing depression and anxiety in medical patients
- Medical consequences of untreated depression
- What to do when anxiety interferes with compliance with medical treatments
- Suicide risk and severe illness
CBT and ACT Interventions for Clients with Medical Illness
Top techniques for fears of death, fears of recurrence, and other distressing outcomes
- Effective strategies for illness-related cognitive distortions
- Cognitive restructuring to reframe, dial down, and challenge unhelpful thoughts
- Mindfulness and acceptance strategies
- Cognitive defusion to address negative and obsessive thinking
- Stimulus control for triggers
- Effective relaxation techniques and exercises
- How to decrease time in bed and other maladaptive behaviors
- Activity scheduling and health-promoting behaviors
- Values clarification in the context of medical illness
- SMART goals for committed action
- Gratitude exercises to increase resilience
How Behavioral Health Providers Can Assist with Management of Physical Symptoms
CBT, ACT, MI and other interventions to improve mood, pain, and functioning
- Symptom burden: how to prioritize concerns
- Motivational interviewing to harness clients’ reasons and resources
- How to address catastrophizing with CBT for pain
- How to help clients with pacing
- Making room for pain with ACT
- Mindfulness, yoga, and movement for management of fatigue
- How to improve clients’ sleep with CBT – stimulus control, sleep restriction, and more
- Relaxation, imagery, mindfulness, hypnosis, and more for nausea
Terminal Illness and End of Life Considerations
Disentangling quality versus quantity of life
- How to talk with clients about readiness to die and quality of dying
- Four things that matter most for a good death
- Top worries related to desire for hastened death
- Differences between supportive, palliative, and hospice care
- Ethics in medical decision-making
- Managing family disagreements and dysfunction related to treatment options
- Decisions to withhold or withdraw care
Clinical Considerations
Ethics and professional issues in working with medically ill clients
- Best practices for communication with healthcare professionals: the SBAR method
- How to share information without breaking confidentiality
- Understanding and working with caregivers who may be as distressed as the client
- Foster resilience in family caregivers
- Management of therapist reactions, disclosures, and burnout
- Limitations of the research and potential risks






