For Mental Health Practitioners

If you need continuing education and hope for stimulating, paradigm-shifting content, you may be interested in a collection of lectures I have developed which offer rich academic research packaged with humorous and perspectivizing references from sources as varied as Saturday Night Live, Gloria Steinem, and Coco Chanel. Associated images, quotes, statistics and handouts are included to add dynamism to research garnered from social psychologists, historians, anthropologists, body-image researchers, economists, theologians, neuropsychiatrists, and feminist thought-leaders.

If you need help with the business side of what you do, check out my seminars in the “Practice Building” Salon. You will find resources like my popular”How to Start Your Private Practice”seminar, as well as information on how to hire me for 1:1 Business Consultation. I also have downloadable, customizable forms for your business and a series of e-books, including How to Make Money in Private Practice…Without Adding More Patients.

Women & Psychology

The premise of this lecture is that women’s psychology is not shaped in a vacuum, but rather in a social context that reinforces depression, anxiety, eating disorders and low self-esteem, diagnoses from which women suffer disproportionately. Together, we will examine the ways in which women’s issues are culturally produced, beginning with a consideration of the implications of a history of male “healers” and female “patients” in the field of psychology. A unique challenge to women’s identity development is the pervasive societal pressure to value a woman for how she appears to the other versus who she understands herself to be. As we examine the impact of such gender expectations, we will also consider how a women’s “positionality”—based on her race, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation—affects the kinds of discrimination she faces. This lecture will provide mental health practitioners with methods for supporting the diversity of women’s identity development and strategies for inoculating them from the ills of a patriarchal culture.