Flowstate Health is a behavioral health services company operating in Iowa and Nebraska. We are a collaborative team of mental health professionals providing medication evaluation and management, psychotherapy, crisis evaluation, and other services for adults and seniors. Full- and part-time positions available for onsite and telehealth work for licensed providers.
Today's blog post is a submission from one of IPA's student members. Student membership is an important part of IPA. If you'd like to mentor a student member, please contact Alissa Doobay. You can also visit the website for donation to sponsor a student here.
Yoga For First Responders (YFFR) and Yoga Shield (YS) is programming developed via consultations with fire departments and police departments over the last 6 years by yoga instructor Olivia Mead and her staff at YFFR. It consists of tactical breathing drills and applications, physical drills, integrated cognitive declarations, as well as neuro-reset (mindfulness) exercises, all designed to process stress, build resiliency, and enhance performance related to the culture and job demands of first responders, law enforcement, and military types of work. YFFR has developed curriculum to train “in house” instructors over 6-day initial YFFR and YS approaches and then have internal training of curriculum at a specific police or fire departments, academy and now also military units with a “train the trainers” approach. I am grateful to have signed up for a recent training class and completed the Level 1 and Level 2 training program though Iowa Army Guard and Air Guard initiative in early summer 2021.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my impressions and experiences from this training. I’m including references from some recommended reading by YFFR in addition to a few books I professionally find valuable. Please feel free to contact me with impressions, thoughts, or interest.
As a Health/Rehabilitation Psychologist in a hospital setting, my role is very different from psychologists practicing in private practice or other settings. On any given day, I may provide psychological services to patients, conduct staff trainings, consult with the healthcare team and provide treatment recommendations, participate in team meetings, train students, engage in scholarly research, and a myriad of other professional activities. No two days are alike in my role, and new and exciting challenges keep me stimulated and engaged. In this blog post, I will provide a “snapshot” of what a typical day may look like in my role as a health/rehabilitation psychologist.
I work at UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s Hospital on a CARF accredited rehabilitation unit. CARF accreditation stands for Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities and ensures that quality of care is being provided and internationally recognized rehabilitation standards are being met. The population on our rehabilitation unit consists of patients with neurologic disorders (e.g., traumatic brain injury, stroke), patients with amputations, traumatic burns, orthopedic injuries, physical deconditioning secondary to various medical conditions (e.g., cancer), spinal cord injury, amputation, and any other medical concern that would require acute rehabilitation. For someone to qualify for acute rehabilitation, they need to meet requirements as outlined by the Centers for Medicaid Services (CMS), and have a medical condition that requires inpatient medical rehabilitation. Patients on our unit participate in at least three hours of therapy per day, including physical therapy, occupational therapy, or speech language pathology. The “core” members of our multidisciplinary rehabilitation treatment team consist of physiatrists (i.e., rehabilitation physician), physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech language pathologists, recreational therapists, social workers, care coordinators, intake coordinators, pharmacists, registered dietitians, nurses, health/rehabilitation psychologists, and neuro-psychologists. Other specialties may be consulted including specialty physicians (e.g., neurology, nephrology, cardiology, palliative care), diabetes educators, psychiatrists, Certified Alcohol Drug Counselor (CADC), and chaplains. Each member of the multidisciplinary team addresses patients’ presenting concerns from their own unique lens. All team members are working toward the same overarching goals: increase functionality, quality of life, and assist patients with returning to the community to live independently.
In 2016, after practicing psychology for a little over 5 years I decided to return to graduate school to study Human Factors Engineering. Apart from being a lover of learning and a glutton for punishment, I had begun to realize both the importance of technology in mental health and the deficits in the design of those technologies. Fast forward 5 years and another degree later, I have learned even more about this.
The use of mobile applications to address health and mental health is growing exponentially. According to IQVIA (2017) there are over 300,000 health related mobile applications available and nearly 100 more being added daily. Of the overall number of health apps, more than 10,000 relate to mental health (Torous et al., 2018). Despite the apparent proliferation of mental health applications, 90% of all current mental health app use can be narrowed down to just two apps, Calm and Headspace (Wasil et al., 2020). Some of that may be due to the lack of usability, credibility, and trustworthiness of some of the apps on the market.
I was fortunate to acquire an academic job directly out of my pre-doctoral internship. However, the downside of this was that opportunities to apply my clinical skills were largely nonexistent, and acquiring the required 1500 hours of postdoctoral licensure hours was a daunting task while embarking on the tenure track. While I had always found academia fulfilling, after two years focusing solely on teaching and research, a level of monotony began to appear, and the lack of opportunities to work with clients began to frustrate me. Not to mention, I dreaded the prospect of having to repeat the same stories from my past clinical work to my students for the next 50 years if something did not change. Accordingly, despite the challenge and risk of adding a new responsibility to an already full workload, I decided to take on a part-time clinical position to complete my licensure hours. Looking back, this was one of the best decisions I have ever made, and the following case exemplifies why I will always have one foot in the clinic.
One of the aspects of clinical practice that I always admired is the variety of challenges, twists, and turns it brings. Even the most seemingly “simple” cases always seem to offer a wealth of complexity, opportunities for creativity and problem solving, as well as the ability to put science to practice. Needless to say, “monotonous” is never a descriptor I would use for clinical practice. This brings me to the case of “Jerry.”
This is my first blog post ever! I consider this another gift of the pandemic.
When I reflect on the last year, I have a hefty share of good memories. Of coming home after work, sans planned social activities, and immersing myself in a landscaping project in my backyard. I dug up old bricks - they must have been walkways or something at one point - to use as borders for new plots I’d carved for mulching and planting blooming things. In my “normal” life, this would have felt like a chore, because I would have been trying to squeeze it in on weekends or random week nights between other things I was running around doing. Instead, I sat in the grass and patiently outlined the new beds and placed each brick one by one, just how I wanted them. It was a time of peace and reflection, drenched as I was in the smells and the sounds and the feeling of spring.
