Our opening keynote address focuses on intervention strategies for grief therapy. Dr. Katherine Shear introduces the concept of H.E.A.L.I.N.G. milestones and stopping points in adapting to loss. She provides simple, evidence-based guidelines for grief therapy that include active listening, validation, support and guidance. She presents a simple approach to grief therapy, based on proven efficacious treatment for prolonged grief disorder, discusses the relationship between usual grief and prolonged grief disorder and how to recognize the latter, and provides tips for understanding and addressing processes that can stall or halt the process of adapting to loss.
Download the slides HERE.
Dr. M. Katherine Shear, Founder and Director of the Center for Complicated Grief, is an internist and a psychiatrist with the heart of a social worker. She is a talented clinician who is widely recognized for her work in bereavement studies and complicated grief disorder. Dr. Shear developed a short-term psychotherapy for people unable to move forward after a loss that was influenced by her inherent optimism and faith in human creativity and resilience. Complicated Grief Therapy (CGT) has proved to be efficacious in three NIMH-funded randomized controlled trials. Her work has produced several assessment instruments and an instruction manual for CGT—a focused, adaptation-focused approach with the strongest evidence base of any grief treatment to date.
Dr. Shear is the Marion E. Kenworthy Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia School of Social Work and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She served on review committees of the National Institute of Mental Health and on the advisory council for its National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. She served as an advisor to the DSM-5 workgroup on complicated grief and adult separation anxiety, a member of the World Health Organization’s ICD11 Working Group on Mood and Anxiety Disorders, a member of the scientific advisory board of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and an elected member of the board of the Association for Death Education and Counseling.
This webinar was the opening session of November's Grief Sensitivity Virtual Learning Institute (GSVLI). For more information on how to access resources from September's and November's GSVLI, please click here.
