San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 19, 2013
The public increasingly wants to know about all of its mental health care options: not just therapy and drugs, but hypnosis, biofeedback, spiritual practices, nutrition, and more.
Hospitals and clinics are increasingly advertising for mental health professionals who have these skills – but aren’t finding them. There simply isn’t an opportunity for practitioners to get these skills in a way that is rigorous, evidence-based, and accredited.
Saybrook, a fully accredited university which for forty years has had faculty in the vanguard of developing complementary medicine and integrative health care, is meeting this demand with the announcement of its new PhD program in Integrative Mental Health – the only program of its kind.
Saybrook already has the world’s leading accredited graduate programs in Mind-Body Medicine, with doctors and nurses who want to broaden their practice, along with health care administrators who want to understand how to support new treatments, enrolling as students. This new PhD program is designed for already licensed mental health professionals (and graduates with a licensable mental health degree), who want to offer patients a broader range of effective treatment options – options that patients themselves, informed by the internet and a thriving culture of complementary medicine, are increasingly asking for.
This new PhD program utilizes a hybrid learning model, allowing significant study online punctuated by visits to conferences with faculty and other students, allowing mental health professionals who enroll to continue their work while they advance their studies.
Saybrook’s PhD in Integrative Mental Health will focus exclusively on evidence-based therapies from a variety of treatment options, taught by some of the leading experts in the field. These include:
- Clinical hypnosis
- Nutrition
- Guided imagery
- Somatic therapies
- Mindfulness techniques
- Biofeedback
- Narrative medicine
And others, including overviews of Chinese and Aryuvedic medicines.
This program is led by Dr. Donald Moss, chair of Saybrook’s School of Mind-Body Medicine and an advisor to the International Network of Integrative Mental Health. Dr. Moss routinely travels around the world offering trainings to health care professionals in emerging integrative health techniques; he reports that the demand from mental health professionals drove Saybrook’s decision to create the program.
“In the past two years, I have met with health and mental health professionals from China to Poland, from Texas to Washington State, and found a well-informed hunger for a comprehensive education in an integrative, holistic approach to mental health problems. Both patients and caregivers are frustrated with the healthcare establishment’s overemphasis on pharmaceutical approaches, and are asking for guidance in applying mind-body skills, Ayurvedic medicine, nutrition, and other alternative therapies to emotional disorders and psychiatric problems.”
The program will be particularly attractive, he notes, because mental health professionals with a licensable graduate mental health degree can transfer up to 30 credits into the Saybrook PhD – a recognition of their already existing expertise in the fundamentals of mental health care.
“The Saybrook School of Mind-Body Medicine has attracted a rich collection of gifted graduate students, with backgrounds in the humanities, spiritual studies, medicine, as well as mental health care. Our students are already establishing a reputation for themselves and our program, by professional presentations at conferences from Rio de Janeiro to Washington DC, on nutrition and health, hypnosis, biofeedback, and other integrative approaches to health. We are now looking to extend the scope of our School with the Integrative Mental Health PhD program.”
Located in San Francisco, California and Seattle, Washington, Saybrook University is the world’s premier institution for humanistic scholarship and research. Saybrook offers advanced degrees in psychology, mind-body medicine, organizational systems, leadership, and human science. For 40 years, Saybrook has empowered students to find their life’s work and achieve their full potential. Saybrook’s programs are deeply rooted in the humanistic tradition and a commitment to help students develop as whole people – mind, body, and spirit. Saybrook University is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). It is also authorized by the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board and meets the requirements and minimum educational standards established for degree-granting institutions under the Degree Authorization Act. For more information, visit https://dev.saybrook.edu