| “At The Center for Mind-Body Medicine, we trained about 20 Georgetown faculty in our integrative approach, which includes the techniques that I describe in Unstuck. Quiet meditation, shaking and dancing, guided imagery to understand yourself, biofeedback, written exercises to explore your unconscious wisdom, drawings. All of these approaches we taught to 20 Georgetown faculty, and now these full-time faculty at Georgetown are leading groups each year for medical students and also for other faculty and for the staff, the people who work at the medical center. This model of mind-body medicine that we developed at The Center for Mind-Body Medicine is now being used in at least a dozen, maybe 15 or more, medical schools in the United States. We’ve trained faculty at different schools—a dozen or so at the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington in Seattle and others at various schools around the country.” |
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| Unstuck: Holistic Approaches for Depression |
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| Interview with James S. Gordon, MD |
| By Daniel Redwood, DC |
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| We have two major new projects. One is working in New Orleans. We have a group of 80 people that we’ve been training and working with, mainly health and mental health professionals. We’re helping them to use this Unstuck approach with a population that’s been traumatized by Hurricane Katrina and helping them to develop a supportive network for themselves as they take this work out into their hospitals and clinics and practices.
The other project—this one is at an earlier stage but I hope it will be very significant—is working with professionals (and perhaps eventually peer counselors) who are working with members of the military coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a small number of people who’ve come through our training who are doing this work at a few military hospitals and VAs [Veterans Administration facilities]. We’re hoping to significantly enlarge that. Our next training in mind-body medicine will be October 25-30, 2008 in Minneapolis. We’re hoping to have 50 to 70 military physicians, psychologists, social workers and nurses or other professionals who are working with returning vets in the VA system and community clinics. And this is just the beginning. And of course, as always, we welcome other professionals and educators to the training.
What the military is finding out, what they’re admitting in their own studies, is that they really don’t have good answers to the traumatic stress that the vets are bringing back from Iraq and Afghanistan. I think that we have an answer that will not only be useful and successful, but acceptable to the military. Because, just as in Unstuck, it’s saying to people, “You can do it.” Military people are very much can-do people. They like practical solutions and we have them. And we have a kind of small group support that people who have been in the military, or firefighters or police, appreciate because this is the way they work. And this group support is also, I believe, so important to all of us as we learn to help and heal ourselves.
Daniel Redwood, DC, the interviewer, is Editor-in-Chief of Health Insights Today. |
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