CME/CEU Credits

The HealthEmotions Institute 14th Annual Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion:
Emotion, Consciousness, and Psychopathology
April 17-18, Madison Wisconsin

Intended Audience

The Symposium is intended for academicians and practitioners who specialize in the study of psychopathology. This includes psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, psychiatric nurses, physicians, medical residents, medical students, postdoctoral trainees, and graduate and undergraduate students with a current or intended career path focusing on research and treatment of psychiatric disorders. The Symposium provides a special emphasis on mentoring and collaboration opportunities between established experts and trainees who represent the upcoming generation of researchers.

Symposium Purpose and Objectives

The HealthEmotions Research Institute, sponsor of the Symposium, uses sophisticated scientific methods to study the relationship between health, consciousness, and emotion in search of breakthrough strategies to advance health, prevent disease, and promote resilience.

The Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion is an annual event of the Institute and exists to build on the tremendous and growing potential for scientific progress in affective neuroscience by promoting the following goals:

  • To increase knowledge and understanding of brain neurobiology and related psychopathologies 
  • To expand and strengthen current research in the field of affective neuroscience
  • To promote collaboration and mentorship within and across disciplines 

Statement of Overall Need

Reversing the Devastating Trends in Mental Disorders
According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), mental disorders result in more disability than any other class of medical illness in Americans between ages 15 and 44. Rates of suicide are higher than yearly deaths caused by homicides, AIDS, and most forms of cancer. Sadly, these troubling trends in morbidity and mortality from mental disorders have not changed in several decades, in contrast to falling rates of death and disease from nearly all communicable and most non-communicable diseases.  Even with optimal care, many patients with mental illness will not recover, where recovery is defined as permanent remission: To put it plainly, the best can we do is simply not good enough.

To achieve meaningful progress in mental health, those who are suffering need more rapid and effective treatments targeting the core pathophysiology of illnesses, and care givers need better tools for early detection and preventive interventions. To achieve this, NIMH an other experts believe it is vital for science and medicine to better understand the intricacies of brain function in order facilitate the tools capable of producing markedly improved treatment, more effective recovery from illness, and ultimately the promotion of mental health.

Knowing the Unknowable:  Progress in the New Frontier
It was long believed that concepts such as self-awareness, memory, feeling, and thought were too elusive to study and their biology too inaccessible to neurological-physiological comprehension. Today, however, researchers increasingly are able to identify, understand, and classify these processes. Though understanding in these areas is still crude, researchers are closing the gap in achieving more powerful treatments and prevention options. In what NIMH calls a “decade of discovery,” advances in brain imaging and molecular biology are unveiling new and untold neurological biomarkers in the brain. These crucial steps position the field to develop more sophisticated diagnostic tools; open avenues for more effective pharmacological treatment and behavioral interventions; and ultimately, yield advanced understanding of pathways to prevent and minimize brain disorders.

Additionally as scientific and clinical understanding progresses, those with “mental illness” will be more commonly identified, understood, and treated as people suffering from disorders of the brain. This reinterpretation stands to reduce the stigma and discrimination endured by those suffering from mental disease.

Making Gains: Concrete Steps toward Progress
Tremendous scientific progress has brought the field of affective neuroscience from esoteric beginnings to a place where its pioneering advances are increasingly integrated with data and methods from complimentary fields and even applied clinically, further enriching progress in mental health research. This new frontier offers both immediate and long term implications/applications for treatment, prevention and the enhancement of overall human health.

Toward that end, NIMH identifies one of its most pressing challenges as the ability to marshal the scientists, ideas and resources needed to tap the extraordinary potential inherent in mapping brain-behavior neurobiology. The HealthEmotions Research Institute strongly shares this aspiration. The purpose of the Symposium on Emotion is to bring together the brightest scientists (both established and emerging) working in high-priority topic areas to disseminate and discuss current findings in a relaxed yet academically rigorous environment. The goal of this exercise is to expand both the number of researchers and the amount of collaboration taking place in areas of highest priority and potential for impact.  

This year, Symposium speakers will explore Emotion and Consciousness with direct application to a number of important mental health issues, including:

  • Schizophrenia—the most chronic and disabling of mental disorders. Even with available treatment people with schizophrenia continue to suffer through their lives. 
  • Depression—the leading cause of disability among men and women of all ages in the U.S. and worldwide, according to the World Health Organization's World Health Report, 2001.
  • Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), also known as Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDDs)—the cause of severe and pervasive impairment in thinking, feeling, language, and the ability to relate to others. Usually these disorders are diagnosed in early childhood and there is no single best treatment package for all children with ASD.
  • Anxiety—a disabling disorder when it becomes an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations. Research is yielding new, improved therapies that can help most people with anxiety disorders lead productive, fulfilling lives.
  • Overall management and measurement of consciousness as it relates to pain and pain management, sleep and sleep disorders, comas, stroke, preterm infants, anesthesia, etc.

Sources:
Pathways to Health: Charting the Science of Brain, Mind, and Behavior (PDF file, 75 pages), 2002.
Insel, T.R., Scolnick, E.M. (2006). Cure Therapeutics and Strategic Prevention: Raising the Bar for Mental Health Research. Molecular Psychiatry, 11(1), 11-17
.

Learning Objectives and Outcome Objectives for Evaluation

After participating in the 2008 Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion participants should be able to:

1. Learning Objective:
Describe and discuss recent advances in basic and clinical neuroscience on consciousness or emotion and their potential to affect the development of new treatments or modify current treatment practices in psychiatric disorders including autism, schizophrenia, and depression.

Outcome Objective:
Identify further research needed to develop intervention or treatment options in autism, schizophrenia and depression.  (Longer term: Have the participant incorporate identified research needs into their practices, research, or studies) 

2. Learning Objective:
Describe and discuss at least three recent theories/frameworks characterizing the neural processes involved in consciousness and their implications for the development of tools for diagnosis and treatment.

Outcome Objective: Outline different applications of these theories for clinical and/or research purposes. (Longer term: Have participants explain how they have incorporated information from theories presented in their practices, research, or studies, and if they have not, explain why)

3. Learning Objective:
Describe and discuss how emotion and sensory awareness work to support the fundamental principles of homeostasis for the management of physical and mental energy. 

Outcome Objective: Identify opportunities to apply this knowledge to the research and/or treatment of neurological, cardiovascular, and psychopathological outcomes in patients or populations. (Longer term: Have participants explain they incorporated information from theories presented into their practices, research, or studies, and if they have not, explain why)

4. Overall Outcome Objective: Participants should be able to list the ways information from this conference will impact their research, practice, or studies (e.g., list colleagues to begin new collaborations with, identify areas of research to follow up, new or altered treatment strategies, etc.)