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Keynote: Tracking Our Destiny With Stories

Room Paradise Ballroom A

Speaker(s)

David Strabala, MSW, LCSW

Description

Long before GPS, there was a guidance system for our souls that tracked the heart’s path through unseen lands. Such guidance is mostly hidden now, like antiques in the attics of our minds. But when the right one is held it can be like a magic lamp shining just for you in the darkness. That guidance is found in stories—fairy tales, myths and such–especially the ones that fit the time, place and purpose we are navigating. The presenter has chosen a dozen brief stories relevant for our uncertain times that might light the path for clients, young and old. We will explore how to unpack the themes or archetypes of stories for sharing the right one at the right time.

Objectives

  • Utilize short stories relevant to uncertain times to provide guidance
  • Unpack the themes or archetypes of stories for sharing the right one at the right time
  • Discuss how stories may be relevant to navigating real life situations
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Keynote: Unbreaking Broken Trust – a Holistic Approach to Trauma Healing and Prevention.

Paradise Ballroom ABC

 

Speaker(s): LJ Punch, MD

Description:

Power4STL is the home of The Bullet Related Injury Clinic and The T, a holistic harm reduction program. During this presentation, founder and executive director, Dr. LJ Punch, will share the Power4STL theory of trauma and approach to holistic healing care. This includes a narrative shifting approach to the impact of bullets and needles in the lives of communities experiencing acute and chronic violence.

Objectives

  • Identify the unique impact of community violence
  • Define Bullet Related Injury
  • Acknowledge symptoms of broken trust
  • Identify opportunities to create a healing environment for those experiencing community violence
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Punch, LJ, MD

Dr. LJ Punch is a trauma surgeon, aspiring healer, and founder of Power4STL, a community of health working to reduce the impact of trauma in the St. Louis region. This includes the work of The Bullet Related Injury Clinic (BRIC) and The T, a holistic harm reduction program with a focus on overdose risk, both centering the experience of Black masculine bodied people because #BlackPainMaters.
 

Presentation(s):

Keynote: Unbreaking Broken Trust – a Holistic Approach to Trauma Healing and Prevention
 

Are U OK? – An Anti-Stigma Campaign and Healing Sensory Experience

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Keynote: Living Your Best Life: Elevate Your Professional and Personal Well-being!

Paradise Ballroom ABC

 

Speaker(s): Susie Arbo

Description:

“Living Your Best Life!” is an energizing and motivating presentation, focusing on how to be the best version of yourself you can be. Whether you work in community mental health, a substance abuse field, a school, private practice, a prison, or a hospital setting, “Living Your Best Life” is designed to help even the most seasoned clinicians and administration professionals continue to learn to care for themselves mentally and emotionally and find joy in their career.  

This motivating session will focus on self care, time management skills, stress reduction, and learning to find a balance between your work and home life.  With the demand being so high since the pandemic in mental health professions, we don’t want to see our fellow colleges burnout.   This presentation will give attendees valuable tools they can use immediately in their professional and personal life, which in turn, not only helps themselves, but also benefits the people they live and work with.  This is an empowering presentation that will inspire mental health professionals to feel positive about their life and rekindle and enhance their passion for this caring profession. 

Objectives

  • After participating in the session, attendees will have learned 10 self care strategies.  
  • After participating in this session, attendees will learn 5 coping strategies to manage stress and their time effectively.  
  • After participating in this session, attendees will learn 5 techniques to help them identify balance between personal and their professional life. 
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Addiction Recovery Support Services: Rationale and Science

Paradise Ballroom ABC

 

Speaker(s):

Kelly, John, PhD, ABPP

Description

During the past 50 years in the United States we have learned a great deal about the causes, prevalence, clinical course, and impact of alcohol and other drug use disorders, including that these disorders tend to have a long course and even when individuals achieve initial remission, risk for recurrence of the disorder can remain elevated for several years. As a result of this recognition of susceptibility to relapse over the initial years in remission, a variety of community based long-term recovery support service structures have started and grown in order to help individuals manage the considerable stressors that must be managed in the early phases of recovery. This presentation will provide brief contextual overview of what has been learned during the past 50 years of addiction science which has led to the emergence and growth of new models of extended recovery support services that are demonstrating effectiveness and cost-effectiveness in facilitating long-term remission and stable recovery.

Objectives

1. Name two major biobehavioral factors that undermine addiction recovery attempts;
2. Describe three empirically-supported recovery supports services shown to enhance remission rates and its duration
3. Understand the concept and value of recovery capital in the remission process
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Strabala, David, MSW, LCSW

David Strabala, LCSW, is currently a full-time counselor in the Clay County Juvenile Office, where he works with troubled youth and their families. He also teaches and tells stories part-time in various settings, including an innovative healing program for veterans and first-responders with PTSD. He tells ancient tales of heroes and tricksters while using a djembe drum to help listeners uncover meaning, depth and wholeness in their life stories. Prior work experience includes community mental health, EAPs, brain injury and mobile crisis.
Strabala is the director of an award-winning feature documentary, “What Is Synchronicity?” (2014), which explores the passages of meaningful coincidence through the views of artists, scientists, authors and others. He received his MSW from the University of Iowa and moved to the Kansas City area in 1993.
 

Presentation(s): 

Tracking Our Destiny With Stories


 

 

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West, Damon

The only athlete in the history of the NCAA to receive a life sentence and parole out of prison with enough life left to tell the story, Damon West has made the most of his second chance. As an addict in long-term recovery, with a lifetime of parole, this former college quarterback has learned from his own mistakes, and the examples of others, that his program of recovery is paramount to everything else. He has dedicated his life to Servant Leadership and his “Coffee Bean” analogy, learned in prison, has become a mantra for kids, college athletes, addicts, and corporations alike.

“Rescued” by a Dallas SWAT team on July 30, 2008, he was finally forced into sobriety through incarceration. Behind bars, in an alien-world, he faced a terrible new reality and severe consequences for his criminal-addictive behavior. Stripped of everything in life, Damon was a blank slate. Sentenced to 65 years (Life) for Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity for dozens of burglaries he committed while hooked on meth, prison life began with a violent baptism-by-fire. Nothing in his privileged background, working in both Washington politics and at one of the largest Wall Street banks in the world, could have prepared him for the nightmares of a Texas maximum-security prison. It would be the wisdom of an elderly convict, the love of his family, a program of recovery and his faith that guided his path.

His acclimation to prison life and tales of survival on the life-sentence building in a maximum-security hell captivates audiences of all ages, genders, races, socio-economic classes and everyone in between.

Since his parole from that Texas maximum-security prison in November of 2015, he has shared his story with audiences ranging from the incarnated to students to the corporate world. His goal in every room is to reach that “one person” and find those who may be struggling with substance abuse or any other life-restricting obstacles. His story is sure to inspire and motivate those who hear it.

Damon’s message connects with audiences on a level rarely before seen, as evidenced by the lengthy and thought-provoking Q&A following each presentation. His ability to articulate his story is proof that sometimes they lock-up the right person.

He has appeared on nationally and globally televised shows. His memoir out in March of 2019, The Change Agent, is a true story about his turbulent childhood, becoming a star athlete, going from addiction to recovery and finding redemption.

“It is my hope that my story, my example, can show others they are capable of way more than they think. In order to stem the flow of pain in society, it is incumbent upon each of us, whether in life, in school or in business, to be like the coffee bean from my story.” – Damon West

Presentation(s): 

The Coffee Bean

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Keynote Address: The Coffee Bean

Speaker(s):

Damon West

Presentation Description: West’s presentation will center upon the theme that the ability to change our environments is within each of us; and, that for true progress to be made in this country, attitudes towards mental health and recovery must change.

Objectives:

  1. Describe The Coffee Bean (back story and applications)
  2. Share lessons learned in recovery
  3. Discuss ways to improve mental health and substance use in corrections (which is where many mental health and substance use patients reside, unfortunately)

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Bell, MD, Carl C.

Dr. Carl C. Bell, M.D. is Staff Psychiatrist at Jackson Park Hospital’s Outpatient Family Practice Clinic and Inpatient Consultation Liaison Service. He is a Retired Clinical Professor of Psychiatry & Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 45 years, he has published more than 500 articles, chapters, & books on mental health and authored The Sanity of Survival. He is co-editor of Pequegnat W and Bell CC (eds). Family and HIV/AIDS: Cultural and Contextual Issues in Prevention and Treatment and Jeste D and Bell CC (eds). Psychiatric Clinics of North America – Prevention in Psychiatry.

Presentations:

Risk Factors are Not Predictive Factors due to Protective Factors

Prevalence of Neurodevelopmental Disorders associated with Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol (ND-PAE)

 

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Risk Factors are Not Predictive Factors due to Protective Factors

Keynote Speaker

Carl C. Bell, MD

Contrary to expectations of many psychiatric practitioners, exposure to a risk factor, e.g., a traumatic stressor, does not automatically put a person on a path to develop a psychiatric disorder, e.g. PTSD. Similarly, having a mental disorder does not automatically put a person on a path to do poorly in life, e.g. languish or get depressed. Scientific documentation will be provided that protective factors have the capacity to prevent risk factors from becoming predictive of “bad” mental health outcomes. Further, protective factors can decrease the risk individuals who are exposed to adverse childhood experiences from having serious psychopathology in later life. A theoretically sound, evidence-based, common sense model is offered as a “directionally correct” way to ensure that at-risk populations obtain protective factors to prevent potential risk factors from generating poor health and mental health outcomes.

Bell 6-3-16 Risk Factors are not Predictive Factors due to Protective Factors – Slides in PDF format