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Saybrook Alumna Lyn Freeman has been one of the leading researchers on guided imagery as a healing technique. In 2005 she received the first National Institutes of Health grant to study it as a method of support for cancer survivors.
Treatment for cancer can often leave survivors exhausted, depleted, and drained -- but modern medicine had little to offer them. Freeman's research was designed to give them something to lead them back from "surviving" to "health."
Based on the Phase I and II results of her studies, the National Cancer Institute has directed Dr. Freeman’s company, Mind Matters Research, to make its therapeutic intervention available to cancer patients and survivors.
While the company is launching the program in Alaska, there is every possibility that it will grow nationally. The Phase II grants Dr. Freeman received require Mind Matters Research to develop and clinically test their approach via tele-medicine and the web.
Dr. Freeman’s ENVISION Behavioral Medicine Intervention is one of a kind anywhere, relying on brain plasticity strategies that are imagery-based.
Strategies include imagery-driven biofeedback to assess and modify heart rate variability and temperature; art, storytelling, and sound to effect physiology and mood state; mind mapping memory practices; and many other therapies that are implemented and evaluated on a daily basis with cancer patients and survivors. Methods utilized are personalized depending on participant symptoms and response. The Intervention optimizes health promoting changes in physiology, biochemistry and mood state.
Recently The Biscayne Institutes of Health & Living, founded and directed by Saybrook Mind-Body Medicine faculty member Marie DiCowden, was named one of 16 best practices for community integration of individuals with brain injury out of 253 surveyed world wide by the Univeristy of Toronto for an upcomming publication.
The Biscayne Institute of Health & Living cares for hundreds of people, from young children to the elderly: it offers the community wellness programs, health education, integrative primary care programs, and rehabilitation; it has a school on premises to serve special needs children and youth so that their school and health care treatments are integrated at the same site; and they train graduate level health care providers from many disciplines in health care and integrative medicine.
"The idea is that we have a center where people don't just come when they're sick, but that provides for the needs of themselves, and their family, at all times," DiCowden says. "It's integrated into the school and the medical programs, and we have a number of activities that extend beyond physical or mental issues into health issue broadly."
Biscayne has also recently received the Florida State Surgeon General's Award Health Innovation, Prevention and Management Award.
Kodak is an iconic company – almost synonymous with film and photography.
It may soon become synonymous with major collapse as well: the epitome of a once invincible company that couldn’t keep up.
In the wake of predictions that Kodak may file for bankruptcy, economists will likely go over the company’s business decisions for years to come. But over at the Rethinking Complexity blog, Dennis Rebelo asks: what if Kodak’s problems were cultural?
Kodak reached a pinnacle where it could afford to be insular – and did. “By sequestering itself, the organization created the anti-culture of success,” Rebelo writes. “The culture it carved out disabled "fresh," innovative thinking. Product development, for example, requires market engagement. Kodak didn't even attend the Consumer Electronic Show (or CES) until 2004—amazing evidence of their lack of consumer orientation.”
To prosper at the top, he suggests, companies and individuals must move from striving for security to finding value in creation and innovation for its own sake – a process Abraham Maslow called “Theory Z.”
It’s a fascinating essay. Read it here.
Dr. Louis Hoffman, a member of Saybrook University's psychology faculty, has been named President-Elect of the Society for Humanistic Psychology.
He began the role in August of this year, and will become President of the society in August, 2012.
Hoffman will replace current SHP president David Elkins. Both Hoffman and Elkins are members of The New Existentialists, a new movement in existential-humanistic psychology that emerged out of the work of faculty and alumni of Saybrook's Graduate College of Psychology and Humanistic Studies.
"It's an honor," said Hoffman, "particularly at this time that many are describing as a renaissance in humanistic psychology and current president David Elkins described as the most excitement in humanistic psychology since the 1970s. Having served on the board for several years, I am quite aware of the talented leaders and scholars that are involved helping attain this resurgence. I hope that we can continue to build upon what we have accomplished, such as drawing in a large base of extraordinarily talented students and early career psychologists to become involved with the society, and creating a very successful annual conference. In particular, I hope we can increase the diversity in the division, including taking a critical examination of what it means for the division to embrace and value diversity. This, I believe, is necessary for us to continue to grow and stay relevant in an increasingly diverse and international society."
