Practical for Your Practice

For many of us, the idea of assessing and responding to suicide risk via telehealth seems overwhelming. As Jenna says, “the stakes are just a little higher.” But that’s all the more reason to become confident in the process; our patients deserve access to the best possible care, after all. In this episode, Dr. Kristyn Heins addresses common provider concerns about treating high risk patients over...

In this episode we have the honor of sitting down with Australian researcher, Ms. Carolyn Heward, lead author of “A Scoping Review of Military Culture, Military Identity, and Mental Health Outcomes in Military Personnel”. Listen in as we discuss the complexity of military culture's impact on military identity and its effect on mental health. We’ll dig into the Military Identity Model (MIM) and typ...

Sleep trackers - what are they good for? While they may give you an entertaining look at your sleep health, they can complicate treatment of sleep disorders. Our guest today, Dr. Diana Dolan, returns to P4P to provide a balanced view on consumer wearables and their impact on sleep assessment and treatment. Technology has evolved in the past few years, and so have our suggestions for how to work wi...

New year! New season! New look! AND new theme! Our hosts kick off season six of the P4P podcast introducing the theme, “Who’s Got Your Six?” (see what we did there?), and talk about the importance of cultivating our own support systems and people. Each host shares a story about someone who has (and has had) their “six”. As mental health providers, we all need and deserve someone to have our backs....

Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing on? Hello? Anyone out there? Turns out, YES! Podcasts are funny things where it sometimes feels like we might just be talking into the void. And what we REALLY want is to have collegial interactions with you, the listeners. So for our 60th episode, we asked for your questions, comments, and “What is your why?” stories, and you delivered! Thank you to all who contribute...

Today we are joined by Dr. Joe Ruzek, a clinical psychologist and former Director of the National Center for PTSD Dissemination and Training Division. Dr. Ruzek recently published a book on group therapies for PTSD and shares his findings and innovations with Jenna and Carin. We discussed the unique benefits of group therapies, more flexible ways of measuring progress, and future directions. As al...

As behavioral health providers, many of us receive training, and are well positioned to help people after a disaster or traumatic event. But what do you do in situations of ongoing threat, ongoing stress and adversity perhaps lasting months or years? In this episode, we are joined by the amazing Dr. Patricia Watson, a psychologist at the National Center for PTSD, who walks us through the incredibl...

In this episode of Practical for your Practice we are joined by motivational interviewing maven and one of our USU colleague besties, Dr. Abby Diehl, who challenges us to become more aware of our righting reflex - or our tendency, as behavioral health providers, to become problem detectors who offer immediate solutions to eradicate said problem(s). Sometimes easier said than done when one tries to...

One of the most common co-morbid conditions with many of the disorders treated by mental health providers is substance-use disorder (SUD). And while many of us as providers are trained in evidence-based psychotherapies for disorders such as PTSD, MDD, GAD, Primary Insomnia, etc, many of us are not as well trained regarding how to manage or treat co-morbid SUD. Research demonstrates that concurrent...

Treatment of nightmares is an evolving field. Today we’re joined by Dr. Shantel Fernandez Lopez, who introduces us to a treatment option for youth. Exposure, Relaxation, and Rescripting Therapy (ERRT) is one of the evidence-based treatments for nightmares. Though it was originally developed for adults, modifications have been made for use with children and adolescents. As one of the treatment deve...

Medication-Assisted Treatment may be intimidating, but it can also be life-saving for clients who are facing withdrawal from opioid or alcohol dependency. Today we’re joined by Catherine Perri, Clinical Director of the Ripple Ranch. Catherine provides us with a crash course in understanding what MAT is, addressing the stigma associated with dual diagnoses, and the goal of utilizing MAT in conjunct...

Eating disorders often have a “bad rap” as being intractable, difficult to treat, and dangerous. There is a wide range of eating disorders, each with their own unique features and challenges. And to make matters more complicated, many mental health providers do not receive focused training on how to treat these disorders, oftentimes leading to reticence to engage, worried that we’ll say or do the...

Always been curious about working with the National Guard or Reserves? In this not-to-miss episode we sit down with CDP’s own Jennifer Nevers who not only serves as an integral team member of the Star Behavioral Health Providers Program (SBHP) that aims to expand the availability of high-quality behavioral health services, especially for those in the reserve components BUT Jennifer is also a Major...

Working with clients with suicidal thoughts and behaviors is one of the more difficult and challenging aspects of being a behavioral health provider. This is perhaps even more so when the client is a child or adolescent. An important, and sometimes overlooked, aspect of working with suicidal youth is working with and supporting their caregivers–moms, dads, grandparents, whoever may be primarily re...

On this episode, Carin and Kevin are joined by long-time host and Friend of CDP, Dr. Andy Santanelllo. Andy has been focused on dissemination and implementation science through The ACT Academy, and returns to the P4P Podcast to share ideas about how we can deliver EBPs more consistently and competently. His suggestions are not just aspirational or “fanciful,” but rather small tweaks that we can ma...

Guess who's back? Back again… Welcome to Practical for your Practice (P4P) Season 5! Your hosts are excited to kick things off with a reveal of this season’s theme. On P4P, we believe in the importance of relating to each as a behavioral health podcast community. So in that vein, for Season 5 we will be asking our guests “what is their why.” What drew them into the field of behavioral health and t...

We asked for your EBP Confessionals and you delivered! Carin, Jenna, and Kevin are relieved to know they are not the only ones who have made blunders while delivering treatment. Today we discuss two “confessions” submitted by our listeners and Carin shares her experience of working with a client who was viscerally impacted by exposure therapy. Tune in for the season 4 finale of The Practical for Y...

How do we support providers who are impacted by suicide loss? Although most of us are familiar with the importance of suicide prevention, we are less familiar with the concept of suicide postvention. Dr. Megan Harvey of the Rocky Mountain MIRECC joins us on this episode to discuss how we can compassionately and effectively support providers coping with a suicide loss, either professional or person...

In this episode, we discuss MATCH-ADTC, an evidence-based psychotherapy for young people struggling with anxiety, depression, trauma exposure, and/or conduct disorders. Our guest, Khristine Heflin, introduces us to this modular treatment that enables providers to meet each child’s unique needs. We discuss how this applies to the needs of military children, in particular, and wrap up with actionabl...

What if you could successfully treat PTSD in 2 weeks instead of 12? Massed delivery of PTSD treatments such as Cognitive Processing Therapy and Prolonged Exposure are gaining empirical support. But how does it work and could you offer it to your patients? Our guest in this episode is at the forefront of research answering these questions. We’re joined by Dr. Cynthia Yamokoski, the Associate Direct...

For many providers, the term “eating disorders” suggests a couple of somewhat familiar disorders like bulimia or anorexia. But, like with many things, the category is more complex and varied than that, not only in the types of disordered eating that can happen, but also the complex contributions from environment, social influences, physiology, crises such as the pandemic, and many other influences...

Just about everyone in the world has experienced something that can be characterized as a trauma. Humans are resilient, and most people recover on their own and function well. Some continue to be affected by trauma long after the fact, and it is not always easy to identify who that may be and how a history of adversity may impact our interactions. There is a difference between trauma-specific care...

One of the issues that providers may face in their clinical practice is deciding what treatment options might fit best for a client who has PTSD. While our brains often go to the first line treatments like PE, CPT and EMDR, sometimes a 10 - 12 session protocol isn't the best fit for the client in front of us who can’t commit to that treatment length or has other reasons that drive a different appr...

Today we are joined by Dr. Tim Rogers, one of our Subject Matter Experts on sleep disorders. He’s been spearheading CDP’s insomnia consultation offerings and joins Jenna and Carin to share the top 3 questions that have been asked lately. Tim has suggestions for how to score sleep logs most efficiently, dealing with comorbidities, and when to start insomnia treatment. Tim also enters our EBP Confes...

As many of our listeners know, the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense (VA/DoD) Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute stress disorder (ASD) was released in June of 2023. The CPG, designed to assist clinical decision-making, provides recommendations that, in essence, give a clinician a fighting chance of identifying treatments that the research...