An odd aspect of my education right now is that I am formally taught by a huge team of health care professionals. After the mornings of following a psychiatrist and interacting directly with patients, each afternoon I have 1-2 "lectures" on various topics in mental health. I'm quotation-shaming "lectures" because when it's just me and another person in their office for an hour, it feels more like a meeting or something, but not a lecture.
There are no real rules for these encounters, so it's been fun seeing each person's approach to covering their topic. Most are fond of handouts, some break out their DSM-V (the official manual of psychiatric diagnoses), one broke out a DVD, and another took me out to lunch for a change in scenery. I've noticed that several have a powerpoint all made up, but they don't actually present it to me because showing a powerpoint to one person is just awkward.
The DVD I mentioned was to provide visual representations of patients for a session on eating disorders. Finding eating disorder patients is particularly problematic at a VA hospital, not because veterans are secretive or anything, but because of the disease time course. People usually develop eating disorders in a bimodal distribution, earlier when they begin puberty or later when they move away from home. The symptoms are frequently precipitated by a life stressor. Boot camp being a phenomenal stressor and coming right after the highest risk times for disease development, an eating disorder patient is exceedingly unlikely to make it through bootcamp.
TIL:
Mindfulness is the biggest component of the most newly established behavioral therapy. Mindfulness is the purposeful attention to the present without judgement.
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