Education Summit

May 10, 2024 | St. Elizabeth Education and Technology Center (SETEC) | Erlanger, KY 

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Social determinants of health are the nonmedical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and shape the conditions of daily life. The experience of substance use or mental illness is different for every individual, and often there is a combination of biological, psychological and social factors contributing to why a person may be struggling with behavioral health conditions. This event aims to deliver a collective of avenues practitioners can “craft” with participants to enhance personalized recovery pathways.

Keynote Speaker: Maia Szalavitz: How Harm Reduction Saved My Life

Maia Szalavitz blends personal experience and years of investigative research into an inspiring perspective on addiction. She eloquently makes the case that addicted people need to be understood on their own terms, instead of being further marginalized by constructs that reflect society’s biases. Deeply passionate about rectifying the inequality in drug policy and harm reduction, Maia gives us a tour of her recovery journey. Experiencing the legal system and treatment programs firsthand, she committed to understanding how we can do better as a society to help others who’ve gone down a similar path. Her work has helped the world understand addiction in a whole new way. From "one of the bravest, smartest writers about addiction anywhere" (Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author), Maia delivers the untold story of harm reduction, a surprisingly simple idea with enormous power.

Maia Szalavitz is an award-winning author and journalist who covers addiction and neuroscience. Her most recent book, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, is the first history of the movement aimed at focusing drug policy on minimizing harms, not highs. Her previous New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction wove together neuroscience and social science with her personal experience of heroin addiction to explore how reframing addiction as a learning disorder can transform prevention, treatment and policy. It won the 2018 media award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She writes regularly for The New York Times and has written for numerous other publications including TIME, Wired, Elle, The Nation, Vice, The Guardian and Scientific American. With Dr. Joseph Volpicelli, she wrote Recovery Options: The Complete Guide, the first evidence-based guide to addiction treatment.

Plenary Session: Rethinking Language and Exploring Bias (Donald McDonald, MSW, LCAS)

Learn just what recovery is, explore a multitude of recovery pathways, analyze the stain of stigma on behavioral health disorders, and come to understand how using accurate, non-stigmatizing language can help break the stigma surrounding mental health and addiction so people can more easily access treatment, reach recovery, and live healthier lives.

Donald McDonald is a behavioral health recovery expert dedicated to equity, access, wellness, and freedom for all people at risk of experiencing mental and substance use disorders. He is a person thriving in recovery from severe mental & substance use disorders. Donald’s background includes being a consumer of services, provider of non-clinical & clinical services in multiple settings, health policy advocate, and recovery community leader. Previously, Donald served as the National Field Director of Faces & Voices of Recovery, Director of Advocacy & Education for Recovery Communities of North Carolina, and Executive Director of Addiction Professionals of North Carolina. For the last five years, Donald has directed training and technical assistance nationally for grant-funded communities. In that capacity, he has worked with over 500 rural consortia across the country as they enhance their prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery support services infrastructures in response to substance use and overdose crises (including Mental Health America!)

Panel: The Power of Peer Support

Afternoon Breakout Sessions:

  • Courageous Living Unveiled: Embracing Change with Recovery
  • Addicted to Numbing Mental Illness
  • The Power of the Pen: How Language in Documentation can Perpetuate Stigma and Bias in Mental Health Care
  • Addressing the Harms of Xylazine: Implications for Population Health
  • teen Mental Health First Aid (tMHFA): Activating Youth to Banish Stigma and Grow Communities of Wellness
  • Befriend the Mind with Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy

APPROVED (6 CEU's):

  • State of Ohio Counselors, Social Workers, and Marriage and Family Therapists Board
  • Kentucky Social Work Board

APPLIED (6 CEUs): 

  • Ohio Chemical Dependency Professionals Board
  • Kentucky Board of Alcohol and Drug Counselors
  • Kentucky Board of Licensed Professional Counselors


2024 Program Sponsors

 

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