SCEH 2009 in Reno, Nevada

by David Godot on October 31st, 2009 § 6

Thanks for visiting my professional home page. If this is your first time here, you may be looking for my curriculum vitae.

I recently had the great pleasure of attending the 2009 Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis conference in Reno, Nevada. My primary purpose in attending was to serve on the faculty for the Introductory Workshop in Clinical Hypnosis. I had spent the previous weeks helping workshop co-chair Dr. Edward Frischholz in preparing an updated curriculum for the workshop. Dr. Frischholz’ vision for the new training model is to enhance the workshop’s focus on empirically validated methods of assessment, treatment, and training.

Dabney Ewin presents on the treatment of warts, hives, herpes, and asthm

Dabney Ewin presents on the treatment of warts, hives, herpes, and asthma

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Welcome

by David Godot on August 21st, 2009 § 0

James, I think your cover's blown!Welcome to my new professional web site. I’m moving all of my professional materials here to Chicago Psychology in order to have a better separation between my professional activities and my personal ones.

In my personal life I’m interested in jazz music, poetry, food and wine, art, philosophy, photography, web development. To this point I’ve found it difficult to balance my presentation on the web between professionalism and personal expression, because I’ve tried to include aspects of both at a single location without allowing one to overwhelm the other. From now on I will keep up on my personal interests over at davidgodot.com, while keeping this site up-to-date with information about my professional life as a psychotherapist and doctoral student.

Professionally, I am primarily interested in the use of clinical hypnosis to improve the capabilities of both high and low functioning individuals. I am particularly interested in the potential for enhancing the performance of already highly capable individuals, such as athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives.

In terms of remediating mental illness, I have a lot of interest in using integrative schematic conceptualization to understand individuals’ habitual self-limitations, combined with hypnotic techniques to overcome those limitations and open up new possibilities. I am a self-conscious idealist when it comes to psychotherapy, and I refuse to get comfortable with the idea that any patient I see will merely “get better.” My goal is for every patient to end up better off than the average person, no matter what limits their personal history or present level of functioning may suggest.

On this site, you can expect to see news about my professional activities within the psychology and hypnosis communities, as well as samples of my academic writing that I think may be useful to the world at large. My goal for this site is to promote my career as a mental health professional, so I will focus on providing information that demonstrates my ability to benefit my target employers and business partners.

Completed My Doctoral Psychotherapy Practicum

by David Godot on June 28th, 2009 § 0

Cleaving the IceAs of Wednesday evening my psychotherapy practicum is complete!

I spent the year externing on the Valeo Intensive Outpatient Unit at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital. Lakeshore is a freestanding psychiatric hospital, and the IOP unit is located a couple blocks away in a separate building. Many of the patients I saw there were transitioning from inpatient care, some were going back and forth between inpatient and outpatient, and some were admitted solely for intensive outpatient treatment.

Valeo is a specialty program that serves gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) individuals, and patients come from a wide range of socio-economic, cultural, and personal backgrounds. Nearly all patients were dually diagnosed mentally ill substance abusers (MISA), with a few patients being treated solely for mental illness and others presenting with primary addictions.

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Chicago GLBT Behavioral Health Training Consortium

by David Godot on June 25th, 2009 § 0

Movimento LGBTMy doctoral psychotherapy practicum on the Valeo Intensive Outpatient Unit at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital focused on the treatment of mentally ill substance abusers within the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) community. Valeo is one of three GLBT-focused treatment programs in the Chicago area, along with Howard Brown and The Center on Halsted.

These three sites collaborate to provide their externs with weekly didactic sessions on issues specific to individuals within the GLBT community. So, over the past year I gained a very broad base of knowledge about the clinical issues and approaches recognized within this field, while simultaneously working with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered clients. This provided an integrative experience that definitely improved my understanding of the interactions between social and psychological factors for minority groups.

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Finishing Psychodiagnostic Practicum

by David Godot on April 7th, 2008 § 0

At this point in my clinical training, I have spent nearly a year on what is called the psychodiagnostic practicum. What that means is that my main job for the last year, as a psychodiagnostic extern at the Diamond Headache Clinic inpatient unit, has been to figure out what psychological factors are playing a role in our patients’ headache pain.

This is a tricky thing to do, for a number of reasons:

  • Coffee HeadacheIt’s tricky to figure out what’s going on with anybody, psychologically. People are pretty complicated; when things go wrong, they rarely go wrong for just one reason. Typically any psychological problem will have some genetic components, some environmental components, some relational components, and some intrapsychic components. You don’t really get the luxury of pointing to one thing in someone’s past and saying you’ve found the answer.
  • These people tend to be especially complicated. There’s some research to suggest that chronic pain patients are more likely to meet criteria for personality disorders than other types of patients. In my experiences, I’ve found that even those who don’t meet criteria for those diagnoses usually have pretty deep-seated ways of interacting with the world that unintentionally serve to maintain their pain status.
  • Headache patients, in particular, are usually pretty resistant to psychological asssessment. This is mostly because they have gotten used to being told that the very real pain that they experience on a daily basis is “all in their head.” Usually they hear this from physicians who are simply frustrated that none of their tests come back positive and nothing they do seems to change anything. The same goes for any other type of chronic pain patient, and probably many people with IBS as well. » Read the rest of this entry «

Hypno-oncology: Hypnosis In The Treatment Of Cancer

by David Godot on December 8th, 2007 § 0

Abstract

Clinical hypnotherapy has been soundly established as an effective treatment for the symptoms associated with cancer and its related therapies, including chronic and acute pain, nausea and vomiting, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, and mood disturbances. Its use produces strong tendencies toward improvement of patients’ quality of life and of treatment cost. As the etiology and progression of various forms of cancer become better understood, the potential of hypnotherapy for increasing survival rates by improving medication response and even slowing or reversing the progression of the disease increases. Given the lack of risks to patients and the wide potential for benefit, additional research and clinical experimentation into this area are encouraged, and recommendations for this type of hypno-oncological exploration are discussed. An experimental hypnotherapy script which attempts to reverse the course of the disease while addressing multiple symptoms is included as Appendix I.
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