On Wednesday, August 17, 2022, Dr. Steven C. Hayes, Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno, presented a mental health webinar, sponsored by the Alan Hu Foundation. In his talk, How Change Happens: Why Improvement in Our Mental Health Will Require Going Beyond Mental Illness, Dr. Hayes explained, “For many years the public has been told that mental health is the absence of mental disease, understood as discrete categories of mental illness. In the post-COVID era, that idea is breaking under the strain of an entire population with significant mental distress. This talk will show that a simpler, more effective, and more practical alternative exists: Focus on the processes of change that lead to human problems or human prosperity. Beginning with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a well-known evidence-based method I originated 40 years ago that has been focused on underlying processes of change, I will show that almost everything we know about how psychological interventions work can fit into a simple process-based model. I will describe the key features of a “process-based therapy” approach and will note how you can use this information to guide your development as a human being.”
Dr. Steven C. Hayes is a Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of 47 books, including Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (which for a time was the best-selling self-help book in the United States), and his new book, A Liberated Mind. An expert on the importance of acceptance, mindfulness and values, methods he developed are distributed worldwide by the World Health Organization and other major health agencies. He is ranked among the most cited psychologists in the world.
Mental Health Association for Chinese Communities (MHACC) https://www.mhacc-usa.org collaborated with Alan Hu Foundation to provide instant Chinese interpretation.
We were honored and privileged that Dr. Hayes shared the knowledge and experiences of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. We were grateful to our audience for tuning in across United States as well as from Australia, Belize, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Netherlands, Singapore, and Taiwan. Thank you, MHACC Founder and President Elaine Peng. Thank you, Penny Chen, for simultaneous Chinese Interpretation.