READING RECOMMENDATIONS
A Day on Burnout
Resetting Your Brain’s Dopamine Balance
The Productivity Trap: Why We Have to Stop
Compassion Fatigue & Burnout: What Works?
Learn science-based strategies for preventing burnout, building resilience, and flourishing and contributing in a sustainable way.
It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way." — Rollo May
Do you regularly feel stressed-out, overworked, and overwhelmed? Like you’re always in a rush, trying to keep on top of things, while at the same time feeling that your life is out of control? If so, you’re not alone. Burnout is a state of mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion, affecting 57% of the UK population. If it’s not managed properly, it can lead to feelings of detachment, cynicism, and ineffectiveness - many of the symptoms associated with clinical depression. Recent years have seen sharp increases in those experiencing it, with one survey reporting a 9% increase in 2021, compared with pre-Covid numbers in 2019.
Content
Therefore, if we want to avoid this fate, we need to rethink how we manage the stressors of modern life. This is why, for this event, we’ve brought together three world-leading experts who will share with you:- Science-based strategies for working with compassion fatigue and burnout (Françoise Mathieu)
- Dopamine: the secret mechanism underlying almost all addictive behaviour, and how to get it to work for you, rather than against you (Dr Anna Lembke)
- The Productivity Trap: why we have to stop, and how a healthy amount of ‘doing nothing’ can lead to heightened levels of creativity, wellbeing, and a more fulfilling existence (Professor Josh Cohen)
If you have the nagging suspicion that there’s a better way of being in this world than the frantic, ‘always-on’, and stimulation-seeking norms of our society, then this event is for you.
Event Schedule:
- 1:00pm – 2:00pm: Compassion Fatigue & Burnout: What Works? - Françoise Mathieu
- 2:00pm - 2:30pm: Break
- 2:30pm - 3:30pm: The Productivity Trap: Why We Have to Stop - Prof Josh Cohen
- 3:30pm - 4:00pm: Break
- 4:00pm - 5:00pm: Resetting Your Brain’s Dopamine Balance - Dr Anna Lembke
Lectures & Speakers
Compassion Fatigue & Burnout: What Works?
Repeated and chronic exposure to large volumes of difficult stories can erode our sense of empathy for others. We can become hardened and desensitized to suffering – or conversely, we can become swallowed up by empathic strain. Since the demand often outweighs what we can offer, we may also find ourselves experiencing moral distress when we cannot help everyone who turns to us. What is the impact of this on our physical and emotional well-being?
How can we stay well while providing support to others?
In this presentation, based on her popular Tedx talk, Françoise Mathieu will explore:
— Levels of Exposure: Assess what elements are risk factors for you
— Where Are You Now? Learn how to identify and recognize warning signs in yourself and others
— Assess your current strategies at home and at work
— Make a plan: Steps to address your vulnerabilities
Françoise Mathieu
Compassion Fatigue & Burnout: What Works?
Françoise Mathieu is the Executive Director of TEND, whose aim is to offer consulting and training to professionals on topics related to secondary trauma, empathic strain, burnout, self-care, wellness, and organizational health. Françoise is a Registered Psychotherapist and a subject matter expert on topics related to empathic strain and secondary trauma. Before becoming a specialist on stress and trauma, Françoise worked as a mental health provider doing both crisis management and employee support to military personnel, medical students, residents, law enforcement, 911 communicators and other community mental health professionals in need of psychological support.
Françoise has worked with the University of Southern California, the Los Angeles Police, Cirque du Soleil, the Chief Coroner’s Office and many other organizations that do high stress exposed work. Françoise is a TedX speaker and is one of the founding members of the Secondary Traumatic Stress Consortium. She is also the author of “The Compassion Fatigue Workbook” which was published by Routledge in 2012 as well as several articles and publications.
Reading Recommendations:
- Tedx Talk
- Mathieu, F. (2012). The Compassion Fatigue Workbook: Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Traumatization. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Miller, B.C. (2022) Reducing secondary traumatic stress: skills for sustaining a career in the helping professions, Routledge.
- van Dernoot Lipsky, L. & Burke, C. (2009). Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
- van Dernoot Lipsky, L. (2018). The Age of Overwhelm: Strategies for the Long Haul. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
Videos/Podcast:
- Southern Regional Children’s Advocacy Center: New video series on the impact of secondary traumatic stress in the workplace.
- A shift in perspective, why it’s time to stop using “Compassion Fatigue” Panel discussion with F. Mathieu, D. Tikasz, G. Sprang and B. Bride
- PH&S Canada Podcast- With Francoise Mathieu
- There is no one magic bullet – With Françoise Mathieu
The Productivity Trap: Why We Have to Stop
‘To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world.’ (Oscar Wilde)
‘To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world.’ (Oscar Wilde)
More than ever before, we live in a culture that excoriates inactivity and demonizes idleness. Work, connectivity and a constant flow of information are the cultural norms, and a permanent busyness pervades even our quietest moments. Little wonder so many of us are burning out. In a culture that tacitly coerces us into blind activity, the art of doing nothing is disappearing. Inactivity can induce lethargy and indifference, but is also a condition of imaginative freedom and creativity.
In this session, you’ll learn about the dangers of our dysfunctional relationship with productivity, why we have to stop, and how a healthy amount of ‘doing nothing’ can lead to heightened levels of creativity, wellbeing, and a richer, more fulfilling existence.
Prof. Josh Cohen
The Productivity Trap: Why We Have to Stop
Prof. Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice, and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles on modern literature, psychoanalysis and cultural theory. His books include ‘How to Read Freud’, ‘The Private Life’, ‘Not Working’ and ‘How to Live. What to Do’. He has written for Guardian, New Statesman and TLS and appeared on BBC Radio 4. He lives in London.
Reading Recommendations:
- Not Working: Why We Have to Stop – Prof. Josh Cohen
- Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion: A History (Columbia UP, 2016), especially the chapters on ‘Nerves’, ‘Depression’ and ‘Burnout’.
- Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford UP, 2015) – this has the virtue of being very short.
- Anne Helen Petersen, Can’t Even: How Milennials Became the Burnout Generation (Chatto and Windus, 2021) – this is less academic and more accessible.
Resetting Your Brain’s Dopamine Balance
All around us people are looking at their phones too much, eating too much, drinking too much. Our world is addicted to fleeting distracting pleasures that get us nowhere. This talk will aim to provide a clear way back to a balanced life. It’s about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most importantly, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting…. The increased numbers, variety and potency are staggering.
The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such, we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. In this session, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, will explore the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain…and what to do about it. You’ll learn how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check, and how combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery can help you find balance.
Dr. Anna Lembke
Resetting Your Brain’s Dopamine Balance
Dr. Anna Lembke received her undergraduate degree in Humanities from Yale University and her medical degree from Stanford University. She is currently Professor and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also Program Director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship, and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. She is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and a diplomate of the American Board of Addiction Medicine.
Dr. Lembke was one of the first in the medical community to sound the alarm regarding opioid overprescribing and the opioid epidemic. In 2016, she published her best-selling book on the prescription drug epidemic, “Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Her book was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic (Zuger, 2018). Dr Lembke’s latest book: “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence” is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times Bestseller which explores how to combine the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery to find balance in an overindulgent era.
Reading Recommendations:
- Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence – Dr Anna Lembke
- Lembke, A. The Smartphone Has Become the Modern-Day Hypodermic Needle, The Journal, Dublin, Ireland, October 2021
- Lembke, A., Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine, The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2021.
- Lembke, A., Eyal, N. Is Social Media Hijacking our Minds?, Paragraph: A hub of discourse between pairs of notable individuals, 2021.
- Lembke, A. Unsafe Supply: Why Making Controlled Prescription Drugs Available for Unsupervised Use Will Not Target the Syndemic of HIV, Hepatitis C, Overdose, and COVID-19, Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2020 Sep;81(5):564-565.
- Lembke, A., Raheemullah, A. Addiction and Exercise. In Noordsy DL, (editor). Lifestyle Psychiatry: Using Exercise, Diet and Mindfulness to Manage Psychiatric Disorders. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2019.
- Lembke, A. Purdue Pharma is Done Promoting Opioids: Here’s Why It’s a Big Deal, Fortune Magazine, Feb 2018.
- Lembke, A., Papac, J., Humphreys, K. Our Other Prescription Drug Problem, NEJM, 2018; 378(8):693-695.
- Lembke, A., Humphreys, K. The Opioid Epidemic as a Watershed Moment for Physician Training in Addiction Medicine, Academic Psychiatry, 2018; 42(2):269-272.
- Lembke A. Can medical marijuana replace opioids to relieve cancer pain? HemOnc Today. 2018;19(24):13.
- Prekupec, M.P., Sussman, R.S., Sher, Y., Lembke, A. Relapse on ketamine followed by severe and prolonged withdrawal: A cautionary case and review of potential medical therapies. J Nat Sci, 3(10):e450, 2017.
- Lembke, A. The Opioid Epidemic is a Symptom of our Faltering Health Care System, The British Medical Journal, published online October 30, 2017
- Chen, J., Humphreys, K., Shah, N.H., Lembke, A. Distribution of Opioids by Different Types of Medicare Prescribers, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016; 176(2):259-261.
- Lembke, A. Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop, Johns Hopkins University Press, November 15, 2016. Named by NYTs columnist Abigail Zuger as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic: “The best summary around of the perils of owning a prescription pad.”
- Lembke, A. Prince, opioids and the rest of us: America needs a massive public education campaign to help people hooked on Percocet and related drugs, New York Daily News Op-Ed, May 11, 2016.
- Lembke, A. Be sure to check the PDMP before prescribing controlled medications, Psychiatric News, June 17, 2016. http://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2016.pp6b2
- Lembke, A. The Compassionate Doctor, the Narcissistic Injury, and the Prescription Opioid Epidemic. The Fix, Nov 30, 2016. https://www.thefix.com/compassionate-doctor-narcissistic-injury-and-prescription-opioid-epidemic
- Haug, N.A., Bielenberg, J., Linder, S. H., Lembke, A. Assessment of provider attitudes toward #naloxone on Twitter. Substance Abuse, 2016; 37(1):35-41.
- Maclean D, Gupta S, Lembke A, Manning CD, Heer J. Forum77: An Analysis of an Online Health Forum Dedicated to Addiction Recovery. ACM Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), ; 2015; Role: Data analysis, manuscript preparation. *Best Paper Honorable Mention.
- Lembke, A., Cheng, Niushen. A Qualitative Study of Treatment-Seeking Heroin Users in Contemporary China, Addiction Science and Clinical Practice, 2015;10:23.
- Humphreys, K., Lembke, A. Recovery oriented policies and care systems in the U.K. and the USA. Drug and Alcohol Review, 2014; 33 (1):13-18.
- Lembke, A., Sacrifice, stigma, and free-riding in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA): A new perspective on behavior change in self-help organizations for addiction. In: University, S. (ed.), 2013.
- Lembke, A. From Self-Medication to Intoxication: Time for a Paradigm Shift. Addiction, 2013; 108(4):670-671.
- Lembke, A. Time to Abandon the Self-Medication Hypothesis in Patients with Psychiatric Disorders. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 2012, 38(6):524-529.
- Lembke, A. Why doctors prescribe opioids to known opioid abusers. New England Journal of Medicine. October 25, 2012; 367(17):1580-1581.
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Date and time
27/02/2022
13:00 – 17:00 GMT
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Online Conference
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Date and time
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