This 90-minute webinar examines common ethical challenges encountered by certified addiction counselors, clinical supervisors and interns working with individuals affected by opioid, stimulant, and other substance use disorders. Participants will review core ethical principles, boundary management, confidentiality concerns, and decision-making frameworks relevant to real-world practice. Through case examples and guided discussion, the session equips attendees with practical tools to identify ethical risks early and respond in ways that protect clients, professionals, and the integrity of treatment services. 

This 90-minute presentation will provide mental health professionals with an understanding of telehealth delivery of evidence-based trauma-focused treatment for children and adolescents who have experienced trauma and engage in substance use. Topics covered will include: (1) telehealth best practices, (2) specific tailoring of trauma-focused and substance use-focused treatment for a telehealth delivery format, and (3), demonstration of how to utilize electronic resources to deliver trauma-focused and substance use-focused treatment via telehealth.

Session Learning Objectives

• Participants will be able to describe modifications needed to implement trauma-focused and substance use-focused treatment for children and adolescents via telehealth

• Participants will be able to understand telehealth best practices and the ethics surrounding distance counseling

• Participants will be able to describe techniques and resources to provide engaging trauma treatment for children via telehealth

The deployment of racialized fear as a political strategy has a profound impact on the individuals and communities who are targeted as objects of fear. In our current climate the use of fear as a tool of racialization is an important site for practitioners to consider in their work not solely with clients who are targets, but also when considering the work of clinical practice.

This presentation will consider the framework of fear and racialization as conceived in the historic work of Frantz Fanon through the work of Afro Futurists who offer language and framing for holding sites of possibility in the Black imaginary in the midst of oppressive conditions of the present. While Blackness is an origin site of this discussion of fear, understanding the application of these concepts may be of significant utility in our current climate to individuals, practices, and spaces who may be targeted as objects of fear.

This presentation will center the significance of understanding what fear can do to people, while identifying the necessity of holding autonomous sites of possibility for both the client, practitioner, and communities in which people reside.

We’ve designed these sessions to provide quick overviews of different trauma-informed tools and techniques that you can implement personally or with clients. Childhood trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACE’s) and substance abuse disorders have significant impacts on overall physical and mental health. Trauma effects can cause emotional dysregulation, social challenges, physical symptoms and mental health impairment leading to substance abuse, violence, crime and other outcomes. This training will be focused on examining how trauma and substance abuse connect, its impacts, barriers to treatment and how it can lead to addiction.

This session examines the intersection of eating disorders and alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, highlighting shared risk factors, warning signs, and how the conditions can reinforce one another. Participants will learn strategies for prevention and early intervention, including how to support youth with integrated, trauma-informed approaches.

Depression is a fundamentally episodic psychiatric disorder, but the mechanisms that drive mood-state transitions over time are not well understood. Dr. Liston will present findings from a series of parallel studies in preclinical mouse models and in patients with depression aimed at developing new treatment approaches by identifying the cellular and circuit-level mechanisms that initiate and sustain mood-state switches.

This professional development workshop provides an in-depth exploration of the theories, processes, and skills essential for effective group counseling. Participants will examine the stages of group development, group member roles, facilitation strategies, and methods for fostering cohesion and working through conflict. Designed for counselors, clinicians, and helping professionals, this workshop equips participants with practical tools to enhance group outcomes and support diverse client needs

Racism, and otherness, continues to be contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. By closely examining how and where the analyst/psychotherapist locates themselves racially and working through our resistance and countertransference to this type of exploration, this paper invites us to include these aspects of mind for our analytic use. This paper expands on how we become raced by exploring the transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, and its intra-psychic, structuralizing components. Using examples from the creative arts and clinical vignettes to demonstrate how being raced, as a universal phenomenon, is embodied and symbolized in mind, opens a therapeutic aperture for clinicians who may benefit from a psychoanalytic, intrapsychic perspective on this aspect of our shared humanity.

Join the Suicide Risk Management Consultation Program (SRM) for our monthly lecture: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Moral Injury (ACT-MI)

Research has shown that moral injury, the pain one feels as a result from a situation where the individual perceives that an important moral has been violated, is a significant risk factor for suicide among the Veteran population.

This month’s lecture provides an overview of moral injury and how to identify it in clinical settings. Attendees will learn about research that supports ACT-MI as an intervention and best practices for applying the model in practice. Participants will also learn how ACT-MI processes can help Veterans develop a new context for their moral pain so they can live their values even in the presence of moral pain.

As identification of autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other forms of neurodivergence continues to rise, clinicians are increasingly supporting clients whose needs aren’t well served by traditional mental health models. This webinar equips mental health professionals with an updated, neuroaffirming framework—covering current terminology, identity-affirming communication, and key distinctions between autistic or ADHD burnout and depression, anxiety, or occupational burnout.

Participants will leave with practical, evidence-informed strategies to support executive functioning challenges, trauma-related concerns, and therapeutic engagement—while creating neuroinclusive clinical environments that reduce stigma and empower neurodivergent individuals to thrive.

Topic Description: This presentation provides a brief overview of the emerging field of positive health, which merges lifestyle medicine with positive psychology in a supportive biopsychosocial-spiritual model of whole-person health. Positive psychology has a key role in lifestyle medicine due to the reinforcing, reciprocal link between positive emotions and health behaviors. Also positive psychology mindsets and activities serve as additional health protective factors through direct physiologic benefits. Two key areas within positive health will be highlighted: 1. social connection with positivity resonance and 2. meaning, purpose and spirituality. These are intertwined, as often one derives greatest meaning from social connection. The talk will conclude with a brief review of recommendations made at the Summit on Meaning, Purpose, and Spirituality in Lifestyle Medicine for research, clinical practice, clinician well-being and medical education.

Mindfulness and Compassion Grand Rounds at Harvard Medical School will be held about twice monthly, live online via Zoom, and is open to those within Harvard Medical School, Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), and members of the CMC community, for free. Our Grand Rounds series has 3 main aims:

• Disseminate information about new cutting edge science and impactful clinical research findings

• Highlight best practices for enhancing the efficacy, accessibility, and safety of mindfulness and compassion delivery and applications for population mental health

• Provide opportunities for healthcare provider self-care and burnout prevention.

Gambling disorder is a complex behavioral health condition that extends far beyond financial consequences, impacting emotional regulation, relationships, identity, and overall functioning. This trauma-informed training examines gambling addiction through a clinical, relational, and systems-based lens, emphasizing safety, choice, collaboration, and empowerment for individuals and families affected by gambling-related harm.
Participants will explore how gambling disorder develops, including relevant psychological and neurobiological mechanisms, while also examining the role of trauma, chronic stress, shame, and secrecy in the maintenance of the disorder. The training highlights how gambling addiction often remains hidden or minimized in clinical settings and provides guidance on recognizing non-financial warning signs.
Evidence-based, trauma-informed screening, assessment, and treatment approaches will be reviewed, with attention to co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders. Participants will also learn how to support affected family members, reduce stigma, and engage clients in recovery-oriented care that honors autonomy and lived experience.
This course is designed for behavioral health professionals and meets continuing education standards by focusing on clinical knowledge, skill development, and ethical, trauma-informed practice across settings

What happens when shame becomes chronic or toxic? Individuals with substance use disorders are presenting with unconscious, untreated toxic shame, yet this subject is underacknowledged in addiction treatment and the wider field. When we understand the role of shame in addiction, we see the need for wrap-around care, systemic and depth approaches - and why we need to include children and family members in treatment. 

This event will provide a brief overview of the M.O.R.E. program and data relevant to individuals in the Substance Use Disorder workforce.

MORE is an evidence-based, transdiagnostic therapy that unites complementary aspects of mindfulness training, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and principles from positive psychology into an integrative treatment approach for addiction, stress, and chronic pain.

This event will provide a brief overview of the M.O.R.E. program and data relevant to individuals in the Substance Use Disorder workforce.

MORE is an evidence-based, transdiagnostic therapy that unites complementary aspects of mindfulness training, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and principles from positive psychology into an integrative treatment approach for addiction, stress, and chronic pain.

The use of creative arts for therapeutic benefit has been noted throughout history with the first documented use of art therapy occurring in the 1940s. Since then, the field of Art Therapy has developed specialized educational training programs and licensure processes to better regulate the application and title. While Art Therapy is a primary form of therapy, it has also shown benefit as an adjunct to traditional talk therapies to improve cognitive, behavioral, and affective domains of well-being. Different from traditional talk therapies, Art Therapy can serve as a mode of expression and communication within the therapeutic process when words aren’t enough. This presentation will focus on the benefits, utilization, and accessibility of Art Therapy in a clinical setting. Discussion will include basic history, theory, and research underpinnings of Art Therapy, as well as examples, ethical considerations, and recommendations in clinical application for non-Art Therapists.

This presentation begins with a summary of the theory of overwhelm, a way of conceptualizing working with intensity and excitation that is not about guarding the self (not about emotional regulation, not about protecting the ego from the drives) but which explores what becomes possible when one reaches the limit of what is bearable in oneself, when one follows the exigency of the unconscious. For the clinician, working with overwhelm is both a challenge and an art form: it requires us, as therapists, to make ourselves permeable to our patients in ways that make us exquisitely vulnerable and to take true risks the results of which cannot be guaranteed ahead of time.

To illustrate the difficulty, but also the extraordinary possibilities of such work, work that rends the self to allow something new to emerge, Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD, will discuss the analysis of a Jewish patient whose encounter with the Palestinian genocide raised considerable anxieties and revived questions of identity, trauma, and intergenerational transmission. The clinical work–and the presentation–raise questions of ethics, of rethinking questions of intergenerational transmission and the debts it incurs, and the relation of the political to the psychic.

 This course is intended for clinicians who provide behavioral health services, particularly those who are supervisors or have an interest in supervision.

Emily Dickenson’s poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, offers a hopeful metaphor representing the universal capacity for all creation to arise from the ashes of adversity, find hope in community connection, and be a force for personal and societal transformation. The impact of our current circumstances has compelled us to action for “liberty and justice for all”, and in so doing we have found ourselves treading on thin, dangerous, ICE. This workshop will define the inner and outer work of hope amidst the current political climate and seek to understand the role of bridging in generating hope. We will explore how hope grounds us collectively in a vision for a better future for everyone, consider strategies for eliciting and supporting a hopeful vision, and what motivates us to work for peace and justice

Learning objectives:

• To understand the definition and nature of self-help groups for substance use disorder.

• To analyze the evidence on the effectiveness of 12-step based interventions.

• To increase ability of clinicians to interact with 12-step fellowships in a fashion that improves patient outcomes.