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Zen Psychiatry

By Elana Miller, MD

Psychiatry Career Mentorship Resources

Welcome to my psychiatry career mentorship resources page! Bookmark this page because I will be periodically updating it with new information.

The 10 Principles of Integrative Psychiatry

✓ Optimal mental wellness is the goal, not just the absence of disease. It’s not enough to be “not depressed” or “not anxious.” Integrative psychiatry is about promoting wellness and cultivating a life full of joy, meaning, and purpose.

✓ Relationships have a healing power. I mean both an individual’s personal relationships and social support networks, which have been demonstrated in many studies to be crucial in overall health and well-being, as well as that individual’s relationship with his or her psychiatrist. I have therapy patients who seem to benefit from our relationship more than any other intervention I do. Being heard and cared for is important. Really important.

✓ The body, mind and environment operate as a whole. You can not treat symptoms without understanding the context in which those symptoms arose. What is happening in the patient’s life, work, and relationships? How are lifestyle habits like sleep, nutrition and movement influencing symptoms? To treat the symptoms effectively, you must address the whole.

✓ An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s not about waiting for a disease to happen and then putting a bandaid over it. It’s about promoting a healthy mindset and lifestyle (whether through diet, exercise, meditation, spirituality, cultivating relationships, etc…) that makes problems less likely to arise, and gives your patients more capacity to deal with them when they do.

✓ We all have an innate healing power. Our natural state of being is healthy, not sick. This is good news! It means that if you feel unhappy, or stuck, or restless, you need only to identify the obstacles that are keeping you from healing and then remove them. Think of wellness as a homeostatic mechanism—hone your skill at identifying in your patients what levers need to be adjusted to help their bodies do the healing it already knows how to do.

✓ Treatment modalities can be integrated, so that a patient can benefit from the best that Western medicine and alternative medicine approaches have to offer. Hence “integrative” psychiatry. The best of conventional medical and psychiatric diagnostic techniques and treatments can be combined with alternative strategies such as mindfulness, herbal supplements, acupuncture, massage, and other complementary approaches.

✓ We have personal responsibility for our health and happiness. A supervisor once told me, “Never work harder than the patient.” It’s a bit of an overstatement, but we should keep in mind, without judgement, our patient’s investment in the process, and meet them where they are at as we work to get them better.

✓ Individuality should be honored. Not all bodies or minds work the same, and we all have different treatments and techniques that resonate with us. To the utmost degree possible, a person’s preferences should be a crucial factor in determining what strategies are used to help them. Never tell a patient that there experience is not real—it’s more likely that you don’t understand the mechanism behind it than that they don’t know what’s going on in their own bodies.

✓ The practitioner must teach by example. Live the same principles that you teach your patients.

✓ All life experiences are learning opportunities. Painful experiences are part of the human experience and do not need to be avoided or minimized. Teach your patients to use these experiences as fuel for growth.

My Practice Philosophy

This 3 1/2 minute video goes over the my practice philosophy, as described in the 10 principles of integrative psychiatry outlined above.

Sample Integrative Psychiatry Anxiety Protocol

As you learn, you should make protocols for the disorders you most commonly treat. Here is a summary of the protocol I use when I’m treating anxiety disorders with a holistic approach.

Get the Protocol

How to Practice Integrative Psychiatry

In this hour-long video, I speak with one of my mentees and a member of my Life Teachings Program about how to start incorporating integrative approaches into your clinical work when you’re completely new to the field.

Recommended Integrative Psychiatry Resources

Organizations & Conferences

Books

Articles

  • coming soon…

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