Weclome to downtown Denver, where the buildings are tall and the wide roads full of clean young cars and pick-up trucks. It's the American Psychosomatic Society meeting 2016, and I had a tube of three posters to present, all of which can be downloaded in full from the UCC psychiatry website. Despite the relatively late timing of the poster session it had a very lively atmosphere.
Dean Ornish gave a great talk on how common-sense behavioural intervention (comprising diet, exercise, stress reduction and social support) can not only be a part of preventative medicine but also have startling value in treating various chronic health conditions, including cancer as well as heart disease.
His talk was followed by Lisa March, who highlighted how mobile technology can be used to implement the kinds of program that Dean Ornish had just been discussing. I liked her term of "minimally disruptive healthcare", capturing the idea of how the process of receiving treatment may be burdensome for some patients.
A symposium on mindfulness generated some interesting topics-Eric Garland highlighted how mindfulness is often defined more in terms of what it is not (e.g. non-judgmental) than what it is, although he suggested that positive re-framing (quite CBT-ish) could be what it is about, as well as savouring (so perhaps increasing positive feelings is as important as reducing stress). Jeffrey Gresson and Linda Carlson also gave interesting talks on mindfulness for stress reduction and psychological recovery from cancer. In both their talks the concept of spirituality was brought up. The spirituality measures they used seemed to differ quite a bit, although frankly I think this is symptomatic of the incoherence of spirituality as a concept.
Speaking of mindfulness, the meeting also had regular well-being classes, including mindfulness and tai chi (I must confess I didn't attend these, given a mix of familiarity with many of the topics plus schedule clashes). It's great that the conference can have these types of events as part of the program, in addition to the awesome Young Investigator Colloquium (covered in depth in an upcoming post).
Saturday morning saw prize presentations from three major
researchers. Following a hagiography of an introduction from one of his
mentees, brain-gut axis demigod Emeran Mayer took to the stage. He presented
some well-known work from the last couple of years on probiotics and fMRI, as
well as broader characterisation of the microbiota. Some newer stuff
highlighted his more recent work with Jennifer Labus using mathematical models
to link a variety of variables at the levels of psychological report,
neuroimaging and microbiota across multiple pathways (it looks a bit like
structural equation modelling, although as he didn’t have scope to get into
great depth; there may be more to it than that). Even if it is just SEM it’s
probably an underused method for mapping the complexity of brain-gut
interactions.
George Slavich discussed STRAIN, a stress questionnaire that
takes about 20 minutes to fill in, thereby giving more detailed information
than something like a 10-item scale, but more do-able than some of the deeply
in-depth life stress interviews which can take hours to analyse. Professor Liz Brondolo highlighted her work on racial discrimination and its negative
psychological impact, with a particular focus on how it may moderate the
clinician/client relationship. She employed an intuitive case-study type
structure to make some of the issues she highlighted more concrete (e.g.
physical fatigue enhancing fatalism around health, social cognition around
subtle conversational cues leading to better/worse communication between
clinician and client).
I had a little time for some tourist stuff as well, including sampling some local brews, as well as a pre-conference visit to the natural beauty of Red Rocks. All in all a good time! (Credit to significant other Daniela Scevaroli for the picture below).
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