Online IOP for College Students and Emerging Adults in MA in Network with Carelon
Though psychiatry has benefited from an increasingly evidence-based perspective and a proliferation of safer and more tolerable treatments, outcomes are not substantially better than they were a quarter of a century ago. Treatment resistance remains a serious problem across psychiatric diagnoses. One source of treatment resistance is that systems within which psychiatrists are working often create pressures to practice in a biologically reductionistic framework. In this context, the important impact of psychosocial factors in prescribing have been relatively neglected, leaving prescribers to work without some of our most potent tools.
In this four-course series, we will:
- Explore ways that a biomedically-reductionist, illness-centered approach may undermine positive pharmacotherapy outcomes, consider the meaning of patient-centeredness in pharmacotherapy, and explore why it may be beneficial to integrate basic psychotherapeutic skills into routine pharmacotherapy (“Thinking about Prescribing”),
- Examine the considerable but oft-neglected evidence bases that describe how psychosocial factors influence medication outcomes and provide guidance about how to prescribe rather than merely what to prescribe (“The Science of the Art of Pharmacotherapy”).
- Explore ways that the patient’s dynamics and the interpersonal dynamics of the doctor-patient dyad may undermine pharmacologic treatment outcomes and highlight common dynamics that interfere with the healthy use of pharmacotherapy (“Psychodynamics of Pharmacologic Treatment-Resistance”), and
- Explore a specific model, Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology, that integrates psychosocial evidence bases guiding effective prescribing with psychodynamic insights regarding treatment-resistance, offering technical principles for working effectively with complex, co-morbid, and treatment-refractory patients (Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology).
Each unit may be viewed as a stand-alone lecture, but the series as a whole provides a comprehensive perspective on a patient-centered approach that facilitates the integration of ordinary psychotherapeutic skills into pharmacotherapy in a way that supports psychiatrist and NPs in practicing at the true top of their licenses.