Mark Freeston (Newcastle, UK)

Making and staying friends with uncertainty : What have we learned about understanding and managing uncertainty distress during the pandemic?

Date et salle :   samedi 24 septembre 2022 , HUG, Amphithéâtre Junod, Hôpital des Trois-Chêne

Horaire :           9h00 – 17h00

Prix :       membres ASPCo Frs 180.- /non membres Frs 280.- psychologues et psychiatres formés ou en formation

Délai d’inscription :         16 septembre 2022 Les inscriptions sur place restent possibles mais sont majorées de Frs 10.-

Modalité de paiement :   en cas de désistement une semaine avant l’atelier ou si un(e) participant(e) inscrit(e) n’assiste pas à l’atelier, 20% de frais seront facturés.

Description de l’atelier

While we have known about the role of threat in anxiety for many years, the role of uncertainty has only gradually emerged as an equally important contributor.  Although anxiety and worry are important and frequent, people also respond to uncertainty with frustration, anger, guilt, as well as loss and anticipated loss and sadness. The earlier part of the workshop will cover the interventions from our workshops in the first nine months of the pandemic that can help reduce the distress by decreasing perceptions of threat and especially uncertainty.  These include managing information and building safety to counter the disruption and information overload associated with the pandemic.  Further, interventions recently developed for intolerance of uncertainty in anxiety disorders can help produce greater resilience. The latter part of the workshop will address some newer ideas. Although the pandemic will have moved on and the disruption will probably be less, we will still be dealing with disrupted timelines and a growing realization that although life may be more like it was before, life remains fundamentally uncertain.  Helping people re-establish timelines from the past to the present, and then to the future while engaging in goal directed behaviour in the face of ongoing uncertainty will be important therapeutic tasks.

Biographie express

My training and the first part of my career as a clinical researcher was at Université Laval (Québec) until 1997 and then at Université de Montréal in Canada.  In 2000 I moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) and I have been research director for the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology since 2001.  From 2000 until 2018 I also held a research, training and development role at the Newcastle Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies Centre. We first became interested in Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) in 1993 at Université Laval (Quebec) when we realized that for people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. In the last four years we have been looking at IU as a trans-situational factor and how people react to real life events that occur and have both uncertainty and threat as their defining features.  Since the pandemic we have been developing and testing the model, developing interventions, and providing training for uncertainty distress

Références bibliographiques

• Brosschot, J. F., Verkuil, B., & Thayer, J. F. (2016). The default response to uncertainty and the importance of perceived safety in anxiety and stress: An evolution-theoretical perspective. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 41, 22-34.
• Freeston, M., Tiplady, A., Mawn, L., Bottesi, G., & Thwaites, S. (2020). Towards a model of uncertainty distress in the context of Coronavirus (COVID-19). The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, 13.
• Mofrad, L., Tiplady, A., Payne, D., & Freeston, M. (2020). Making friends with uncertainty: experiences of developing a transdiagnostic group intervention targeting intolerance of uncertainty in IAPT. Feasibility, acceptability and implications. The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, 13.