I’m coming close to the end of my doctoral training, and will be taking my last course ever at the Adler School of Professional Psychology this summer. During the summer term I’ll also start my applications for internship in the Chicago area. I was recently offered an internship in North Carolina but it is important to me to stay with my family over the internship year, and so I’ll be looking for sites closer to home. If you would like to discuss a possible internship opportunity, please get in touch with me!

Dissertation Complete By August, 2010

I recently completed my first draft dissertation proposal, and expect to have it defended by mid-April of this year. My research will be the beginning of a process to empirically validate a set of clinical hypnosis training modules. To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first ever attempt to develop materials for clinical education that are proven to impart the information and clinical skills that they are intended to impart. My committee consists of: Stephen P. Kahn, Ph.D. (Chair), Edward J. Frischholz, Ph.D., ABPH, and Robert T. Baker III, Psy.D.

Advancing Clinical Hypnosis On The Web

You may be aware that I am the Webmaster and Listserv Coordinator for APA Division 30. I recently spoke at length with Stephen Lankton, the current editor of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, about the possibilities for using the internet to better disseminate the information published in the Journal and to increase the scientific presence of clinical hypnosis. Toward that end, I may soon be joining the editorial board of the AJCH in order to help compile a topic-organized bibliography from the journal to enable dissemination of the research through prominent web sites like Wikipedia.

Advancing Clinical Hypnosis At The Adler School

This semester I have been working as a Research Assistant and Teaching Assistant for Dr. Steve Kahn, head of the Clinical Hypnosis program at the Adler School of Professional Psychology. Dr. Kahn, Scott Hoye, and I have formed an official student hypnosis organization, the Adler Clinical Hypnosis Association (ACHA). Through this organization we will be leading in-school presentations to increase enrollment in the hypnosis program as well as out-of-school discussions to enhance members’ knowledge and skill in the use of clinical hypnosis. I am presently serving a term as Vice President of ACHA.

We have also been in the process of developing new training sites for hypnosis students at Adler. Problems with the economy over the past decade have caused a shortage of training sites for all types of clinical students, and I am aware of only one practicum site in Chicago that currently offers students the explicit ability to build up their skill in utilizing hypnosis with their patients–and that site is having trouble maintaining funding. At the request of Dr. David Paul Smith, I have written up a brief editorial piece for the upcoming issue of SCEH’s FOCUS newsletter explaining why I believe that expanding the available training opportunities is the single most important thing the professional hypnosis societies can do to improve the future of clinical hypnosis.

Articles Posted Around The Web

I have recently posted a number of original articles on this web site and elsewhere around the web. Here are some that come to mind:

• A Review of Interventions for Reducing Mental Health Stigma – Mental health stigma has been identified as a major barrier to the delivery of appropriate mental health services, but few coherent attempts to reduce this barrier have been made. This analysis examines the interventions that have been tried, their results, and considers possibilities for more robust community interventions.
• Robert Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence: Video + Cheatsheet – Shows a recent video of Dr. Cialdini explaining some of the principles of influence. The most useful part of this post is the cheatsheet I put together based on his book Influence: Science And Practice. The post describes each of the “weapons” of social influence in brief for quick reference.
• An Egodynamic Model of Hypnosis – Presents a model for understanding hypnotic phenomena from an ego psychological perspective.
• Cannabis, Metabolic Syndrome, and Emotional Distress – Reviews evidence that cannabinoids play a critical role in the regulation of metabolism, and argues that chronic cannabis use may represent a form of self-medication for metabolic syndrome and the emotional distress that is associated with this condition.
• Hypnotizability May Be Unrelated To Dissociation & Cognitive Inhibition – A person’s apparently innate capacity to experience a particular level of hypnotic phenomena – referred to as “hypnotizability” – is an important concept in modern hypnosis research. This post reports on an article by Diennes et al published in the peer-reviewed journal Conciousness and Cognition.
• Early Recollections And The Lifestyle – Explains an Adlerian technique for assessing the private logic and internal motivations of therapy clients.
• Aging Brains Only Shrink When They’re Sick – Reports on a study published in the APA journal Neuropsychology that found that age-related loss of brain mass (And associated cognitive decline) may be a function of illness, rather than a natural part of the aging process as has been generally assumed.
• Adlerian Career Assessment & Counseling – Critically evaluates Adlerian frameworks for assessing individuals’ career paths, and for helping them to develop their careers and career identities.
• Transformational Leadership In Mental Health Administration – Examines the benefits of transformational leadership styles on organizational outcomes in mental health care.
• Re-Branding Psychology: Why Therapists Have Got It All Wrong & What We Can Do About It – Argues that psychotherapists and psychology groups such as the APA should be more aggressively marketing the proven positive benefits of psychotherapy.
• A 2009 Mental Health Parity Policy Analysis – In this policy analysis I review the history of mental health parity advocacy and the philosophy underlying this movement. I also critically examine the practical consequences of both the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 and its predecessor, the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996.

David Godot is a licensed psychotherapist currently working in private practice under the supervision of a clinical psychologist in downtown Chicago. He can be reached by phone at (312) 869-2323, or by email at davidgodot@chicagopsychology.org

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 asthma

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As 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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My 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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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:

• It’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 «