2011 Psych Congress

Charles Raison, MD:
As is our custom, we break from the question-answering routine of the Treating the Whole Patient (TWP) Community Forum each year at this time to talk about the things that excite us most about the upcoming 24th Annual U.S. Psychiatric and Mental Health Congress(Psych Congress), to be held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, NV, from November 7-10.

Like many people who attend, we are shameless fans of Psych Congress, and we feel for good reason. There just is no other meeting in the United States that manages to so seamlessly marry cutting edge science with intense clinical practicality or to do this over so wide a range of issues relevant to both mental illness and mental well-being. Psych Congress has a loyal family of attendees and never fails to deliver in many tried and true ways. But we think it is even more exciting that Psych Congress organizers push themselves to also make each Congress new and dynamic. Maybe we’re biased, but we think this year’s Psych Congress will be the most challenging, wide-ranging, and useful of any yet mounted.

As members of the Steering Committee for Psych Congress who have been involved in helping shape this year’s event, we feel that we are in an especially privileged position to make this claim. We’d like to use the Community Forum to make an altogether inadequate attempt to mention some of the highlight’s of this year’s event that are “not to be missed.”

OK so we’re biased because we created it, but we really feel that a signature educational event of Psych Congress in recent years, Treating the Whole Patient, will be especially exciting and groundbreaking this year. As those who have attended TWP in the past know, the series synthesizes huge amounts of cutting edge science to offer comprehensive mind-body understandings of both mental illness and health that have clear clinical implications. This year we take TWP to the next logical step, by building the science around the types of real-life clinical scenarios that you deal with on a daily basis. This year’s TWP will dramatically demonstrate how a mind-body approach to healing can transform the lives of people with a range of psychiatric conditions, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, treatment-resistant depression, chronic pain, chronic sleep disturbance, and schizophrenia.

While important in and of itself, this year’s TWP will also serve as a bridge between past TWP programs and the TWP community we hope—with your help—to inaugurate and build this year. To launch this community we will for the first time set forth a series of basic guidelines for integrating TWP principles into clinical practice. Using these principles as a template, we will invite you to consider joining a TWP community by committing to work to implement TWP to whatever degree possible in your practices and then sharing your successes and failures with us and other members of the community so that we can learn together how to translate ideas into clinical realities.

Wellness has been an important focus of TWP, based on overwhelming data that it is both an important goal in and of itself, and because it represents a novel and potentially powerful way to augment therapeutic interventions with our patients. But why should they be the only lucky ones?

We tackle this question head on this year by offering for the first time a program entitled “Restoring Balance Workshops.” After a full day of education, you will have an opportunity to rejuvenate your body and spirit by participating in these interactive sessions focused on balance, self-awareness, and wellness. Yoga and Meditation sessions will be available on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings. Space is limited and pre-registration is required. While good for our mental health, these experiential sessions are—we believe—an important opportunity to expose ourselves to wellness techniques that we can then teach our patients. Moreover, very powerful data demonstrate that healing ourselves is one of the surest ways to optimize our therapeutic efficacy with our patients.

The range of clinical and practice-related topics offered at Psych Congress is always extensive and this year is no exception. The continuing expansion of learning opportunities beyond formal CME lectures is exceptional, however. Based on their huge popularity last year, case-based interactive sessions will again be available by pre-registration. We would strongly encourage everyone to sign up for one of these discussion-based, hands-on learning experiences. But please don’t be frustrated with us if they are already booked!

Several other unique learning opportunities at this year’s Psych Congress are also worth mentioning. Psych Congress Steering Committee members will be available for wide-ranging discussion and sharing of clinical perspectives at regularly scheduled “Meet the Experts” sessions. These informal sessions offer an intimate atmosphere to interact, ask questions, share experiences, and engage in conversations with Steering Committee members. Topics to be discussed will include fibromyalgia, psychiatric conditions in cancer patients, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, and sleep disorders. Finally, the last several years have seen great refinements and innovation in Professional Medical Education Theater Presentations. These non-CME sessions are supported by industry and present disease state and/or product specific discussions in ways that are often highly creative and effective.

Of course, it goes without saying that the greatest educational strength of Psych Congressis the range and quality of its teachers. We are unashamedly impressed with this year’s line-up, which includes John Oldham, current President of the American Psychiatric Association, and other world-renowned researchers such as Michael Thase, George Papakostas, Laura Miller, Phillip Resnick, John Docherty, Mark Gold, J. Craig Nelson, Wayne Drevets, Murray Stein, Steven Hickman, and Karen Dineen Wagner to name a few. It’s an honor for us to be able to share the stage with all our fellow presenters.

We could go on, but we’ll restrain ourselves. We look forward to seeing everyone at this year’s Psych Congress.

Charles Raison, MD
Jon W. Draud, MS, MD
Rakesh Jain, MD, MPH
Vladimir Maletic, MD, MS