What is quality treatment for OCD and Anxiety Disorders?
One of the reasons I originally started to share about mental health and recovery skills was because I was fortunate to get effective help, but when I started to join online mental health communities, I would hear people sharing about the help they were getting, and it wasn’t at all in line with where the…
A workshop on cybersecurity and the usefulness of ACT
Back in the fall of last year I was facilitating a workshop with Syntegrity Group and IEEE that brought together machine learning, artificial intelligence, public policy, and cyber security experts to write a white paper on the current and near future state of how AI is transforming cybersecurity. You can download the white paper and…
Shanghai and the changing world of manufacturing
I was in Shanghai to participate in a meeting on the future of manufacturing. It had been ten years since I was last there. How the city had transformed in that decade, not only in what was there but how people were interacting and businesses were operating (ex: paying for everything from taxi rides to…
So you want to work in mental health…
I was part of a panel discussion at the University of Toronto recently on community engagement work in the mental health sector. It was exciting to see so many people interested in working in mental health. The questions and comments from the audience made it clear that they understood the need for patient-centered innovation and they…
Strategy workshop in Indonesia on evidence-based public policy
I was in Indonesia with Syntegrity Group and the Knowledge-Sector Initiative to help over 50 public sector and academic leaders from across the Indonesian archipelago to connect research more directly to implementing effective public policies. This was the first bilingual workshop I’d ever done. The conversations were conducted in Bahasa Indonesia, so I want to…
The Internet Killed Traditional CBT
When I was doing Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP) therapy for OCD, it was very behavior-focused. It was all about progressively cutting out compulsions, starting from the easiest and working up to the most difficult. Although ERP is a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), it’s generally heavier on the B than the C. But…
Mental Health Service Collaboration Across Sectors and Agencies
I was recently part of a design workshop with local government and mental health services, exploring how to collaborate better around delivering effective mental health services. As a former Executive Director of a peer support charity, and a former mental health service user, I’ve had the opportunity to be on both sides of the equation.…
What causes OCD? (video)
When it comes to the question of what causes Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, the simple answer is that the causes are complex. But what I really want to emphasize when it comes to any anxiety disorder, is that it really doesn’t matter who or what is responsible for getting you to where you are. What matters…