Mind strategies for healthy thinking and the prevention of distressful episodes
Poster C14, Wednesday, October%2010, 11:30%20am%20-%201:00%20pm, Essex%20Ballroom
Gregory Shankland1; 1MAD-Sense
Simple techniques developed from the practice of mindfulness and neuro linguistic programming (NLP) can be applied in self help mode to disrupt, interrupt and prevent distressful experiences associated with the hearing voices experience and other information:emotion disturbances. Bayes' Theorem of Perception and Paul Gilbert's description of our emotional systems can be integrated to describe the relationship between stimuli (new information) and the flow of emotions as we process information predictively from perception to interpretation. NLP helps us control our information processing and the emotions that result. Mindfulness helps us ground our interpretations in the real world social contexts in which we live and thrive. These ideas help us model madness as the struggle to process and interpret hallucinatory stimuli and understand madness in neuroplastic terms. With this understanding simple NLP and mindfulness techniques can be applied in a self directed way in a form of mind stimulation therapy to correct the information:emotion flow (InfoMotion) and object relationships that are destabilized by the weirdness of hallucinatory stimuli. Learn how... 1. Everything flows from the phenomenology, which we can observe directly 2. We can learn to control our reaction to it and... 3. Shape a mindful response that... 4. Works with our cognitive and confirmation bias to... 5. Develop confidence in self and in the world we live in. By understanding this InfoMotion flow we can learn to anticipate it and use the same NLP techniques to prepare for and prevent distressing episodes.
Topic Area: Psychosocial Interventions