Supportive Psychotherapy: Helping the Clinician Survive
(Psicoterapia de Apoyo en Oncología: Ayudando al Clínico a Sobrevivir)

Monday, 9 June 2008 - 8:30 am - 4:30 pm
presented by Jimmie C. Holland MD and Marguerite Lederberg MD, with collaboration and translation from Ruben Cesarco MD

Presented in English with Spanish translation / En Inglés con traducción al Español

Target Audience:

The audience which will benefit will be clinicians from psychology, social work and psychiatry who are engaged in clinical care and therapy of patients with cancer.

Workshop Objectives:

1. The audience will be able to understand the range of supportive therapies

2. How to use the therapies and how to flexibly use them in practice

3. The attendee will learn and discuss countertransference and transference

4. The attendees will discuss cross cultural differences in patients’ responses to theory

Workshop Description:

This workshop was designed to help the psycho-oncology therapist conduct psychotherapy with cancer patients. While there are many psychotherapies today which have manuals to guide therapists, they are of little value to the clinician who is often faced with an evolving picture of the patient’s psychodynamic issues during illness. In conducting this workshop over the past two world congresses we have found that key issues for therapists are similar across our countries and cultures. It is these core issues of transference and countertransference that make this work exciting and challenging. A therapist must be able to have a broad understanding of the common emotions which cancer brings out, particularly anxiety, depression, vulnerability, anger, and existential concerns of life and death. These presenting symptoms also offer a window of opportunity to help patients cope and many gain a new level of maturity through posttraumatic growth. This workshop will review psychotherapies that have been validated in clinical trials, as well as discussing the common problems faced by clinicians in conducting psychotherapy. Psychiatrists Holland and Lederberg are seasoned clinicians from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. They will be joined by Ruben Cesarco, also a seasoned psychiatrist from Montevideo, Uruguay. This workshop will be conducted in a bilingual mode (English/Spanish), with a breakout session in Spanish for those who are Spanish speaking.