How Change Happens: Why Improvement in Our Mental Health Will Require Going Beyond Categories of Mental Illness
By Steven C. Hayes, PhD
Foundation Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno
Presented by the Alan Hu Foundation
Pleasanton, Calif. — July 20, 2022 — On Wednesday, August 17, 2022, Dr. Steven C. Hayes, Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno, will present 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 explains, “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.”
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.
The free webinar will be held on Wednesday, August 17, 2022, from 6:30 – 7:30 pm PDT via Zoom. It will include 15 minutes for questions and answers following Dr. Hayes’s presentation. Please RSVP by Tuesday, August 16, 2022, at: https://alanhufoundation.org/mental-health-lecture-series to receive the Zoom meeting link. Participants may join beginning at 6:15 pm. The Mental Health Association for Chinese Communities at https://www.mhacc-usa.org will provide simultaneous Chinese interpretation.
The Alan Hu Foundation was created by Xiaofang Chen and Chih-Ching Hu in memory of their son, Alan. He passed away due to mental disorders in 2018 at the age of 15. Their mission is to promote mental health, raise awareness and remove stigma surrounding psychiatric disorders, and to support fundamental research for cures.
For further information and to support the Alan Hu Foundation, please visit the website: https://alanhufoundation.org/helping