I am slowly figuring out how we might move the existing health care system toward better care of stress illness patients. I learned a lot more yesterday when, for seven hours, I shared ideas with two dozen mental health clinicians who came from a wide range of training backgrounds and professional positions.
As I prepared for the class, the questions uppermost in my mind were about the group’s interest in and ability to learn about clients with physical symptoms. Would they conclude this was too far outside of their training and experience? Or just something in which they had little interest? Or, if they were willing to learn how to help people with this problem, could they master the skills in a reasonable amount of time?
Fortunately, the class was attentive and focused from the start. Though I must reserve final assessment until I see their course evaluations and comments, I encouraged dialog from the attendees and they seemed fully engaged by the idea of using their empathy skills, training and experience to relieve somatic (body) symptoms.
I taught them how to do a Stress Check-Up, which consists of obtaining the chronology of the patient’s symptoms and then a Stress History (click on tag below for other posts on that topic).
Then I tested them. More on that in the next post.
