Friday, October 19, 2012
9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
6 CE credits offered (credits are offered to psychologists, counselors, social workers, students, other mental health workers, and the general public)

Loyola University Maryland
Columbia Graduate Center, Room 360/362
8890 McGaw Road
Columbia, MD 21045

The first part of this workshop will present findings from the Harvard Child Bereavement Study and look at the impact of parental death on school-age children. Children most at-risk for emotional and behavioral problems after the death of a parent will be identified along with intervention strategies to help them. A second group of resilient children will be discussed along with the key features of adaptive grieving and way to foster resilience in the bereaved.

The second part of the workshop will look at how and why the mourning process can go wrong and lead to complicated bereavement. Specific ways to diagnose and treat complicated mourning will be addressed. The recent attempt to include Bereavement in the forthcoming DSM V will be discussed in detail.

Participants will be able to:

• Understand the impact of parental death on school-age kids
• Discuss intervention approaches for bereaved children and families
• Outline why and how mourning can go wrong
• Understand how to diagnose and treat complicated bereavement
• Look at the DSM V effort to make grief a disease

About the Presenter

J. William Worden, PhD, ABPP, is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and holds academic appointments at the Harvard Medical School and at the Rosemead Graduate School of Psychology in California. He is also Co-Principal Investigator of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study, based at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Recipient of 5 major NIH grants, his research and clinical work over 40 years has centered on issues of life-threatening illness and life-threatening behavior.

Dr. Worden has lectured and written on topics related to terminal illness, cancer care, and bereavement. He is the author of Personal Death Awareness; Children & Grief: When a Parent Dies, and is coauthor of Helping Cancer Patients Cope. His book Grief Counseling & Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner, now in its fourth edition, has been translated into 14 foreign languages and is widely used around the world as the standard reference on the subject. Dr. Worden’s clinical practice is in Laguna Niguel, California.

Seminar Schedule:

Sponsored by the pastoral counseling department, Loyola’s Clinical Centers, the psychology department, the School of Education, and the Counseling Center.