Date & Location

Monday, July 7, 2025 – Thursday, July 10, 2025

8:15am – 12:30pm

Canmore Recreation Center, Room 115

1900 8 Ave, Canmore, AB T1W 1Y2

Workshop Description

This intensive explores a groundbreaking shift in how trauma, anxiety, and depression are understood and treated. It synthesizes research from various fields—metabolism, psychoneuroimmunology, epigenetics, and neuroscience—into an integrated model of mental health care. This model emphasizes the critical connections between the immune system, diet, brain structure, and even gut bacteria, offering a comprehensive vision of how these factors influence mental health and emotional well-being.

A key aspect of the intensive is its focus on clarifying fundamental terms like energy, mind, and self, which have been used ambiguously in both scientific and therapeutic contexts for over a century. By drawing on the latest research, the intensive proposes a more unified understanding of these concepts, offering a more precise framework for mental health professionals. It highlights how the brain’s mental operating networks create and influence our states of mind, which interact in feedback loops to form what we think of as the mind.

Therapists of the 21st century are increasingly expected to play a more holistic role in mental health care, akin to healthcare workers addressing the full range of mind-body-brain interactions. This intensive reflects that shift, encouraging practitioners to expand their toolkit to include an awareness of the body’s physiological processes and how they influence mental health.

The intensive concludes with an exploration of positive psychology and the role of contemplative practices like mindfulness, offering insights into how these approaches can enhance therapeutic work and promote resilience and healing.

Ultimately, this intensive is about rethinking how we approach mental health treatment, integrating a wide array of scientific disciplines to provide a more holistic and effective model for healing.

Learning Objectives

• Discuss the changing view of diagnosis

• Learn about the limitations of reductionism with psychopharmacology

• Explain how energy is produced and maintained

• Discuss how excessive reactive oxygen species can result in ill health

• Understand the relationship between health and mental health

• Learn about the interaction between the immune system, genes, brain dynamics, and mental health

• Understand how genes can be expressed or suppressed

• Understand how autoimmune disorders contribute to depression, anxiety, and cognitive problems

• Identify the mental operating networks

Agenda

Monday, July 7, 8:15am – 12:30pm

• Explore the Synthesized Model and Understanding Neuroscientific Foundations

• The abandonment of the DSMs

  • NIMH launches an alternative

• Problems with long-term efficacy of psychotropic medications

  • Down regulation versus upregulation

• The Systems-Complexity approach

  • Feedback loops between and within body systems

• Lessons from psychotherapy research

• The principal role of biological energy

  • Metabolic Foundation of health

  • ATP versus free radicals

• Epigenetics

  • Nature and Nurture of gene expression

Tuesday, July 8, 8:15am – 12:30pm

• Immune system and mental health

  • Psychoneuroimmunology

  • The dominant role of chronic inflammation in mental health

• The mental operating networks

  • The Salient Network

  • The Default Mode Network

  • The Executive Network

Wednesday, July 9, 8:15am – 12:30pm

• Allostasis versus Allostatic Load

  • How stress systems undermine mental health

• The Memory Networks

  • The implicit and Explicit Networks

• Dysregulation of memory = impaired mental health

  • How to integrate memory networks

  • Autostress—the ramping up of stress

  • Anxiety variations

• Navigate Neurodynamics of PTSD

  • The integration of therapeutic approaches

Thursday, July 10, 8:15am – 12:30pm

• Depression in its many forms

  • Bolstering the feedback loops

• The role of lifestyle

  • Sleep, Diet, and Exercise

• Positive Psychology

• Mindfulness and Contemplative Practices