The AUT University in Auckland offers a MindBody Postgraduate Programme in the department of Psychotherapy.
Who can study MindBody Healthcare at postgraduate level?
This pathway within the Health programmes caters for many health professionals, including doctors, nurses, counsellors, psychotherapists, body therapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, chiropractors, osteopaths and dentists. The papers are offered in block mode. MindBody Healthcare is concerned with integrative ways of looking at health, illness and disease, and health care from physical, psychological, subjective, family, cultural and spiritual perspectives.
This is what Dr. Brian Broom, the initiator of the program, says about its scope and content (read the full interview in the Synergies section):
You mentioned education earlier. Can you talk a little bit about the Mindbody postgraduate program that you helped install at Auckland University? How does this program look like and what is it that people learn there? And what process do clinicians go through before they become mindbody therapists?
As you saw from the book “Transforming clinical practice with the mindbody approach” it is a multidisciplinary course. So you have doctors and therapists and occupational therapists, natural therapists and body therapists and others taking this course. That forces an ethos of creativity in which people are forced to realize or discover that there are powerful cross-disciplinary generic elements in addition to their own specific disciplinary elements. It is also true that whole person work requires different up-skilling for different disciplines. So for instance a body therapist discovers that he needs to listen more, a psychotherapist has to learn how to be a good host to the body in the room without taking medical responsibility for it, a doctor has to learn how to listen rather than fix and so on. Some of it is about each discipline discovering in what way they have shut down elements of access to the whole of the patient and the client.
One of the reasons why we started this program is that I had done many workshops around the world and realized that many people get enthusiastic after a two day workshop and then they go back to their workplace and find that they can’t actually summon up the resources to be a whole person oriented clinician in their normal context. There are two reasons for this. One is that unless you have a very strong sense of the wholeness or connectedness of the other, you can’t do this work. Because you are always implicitly or unconsciously or subconsciously saying ‘is it the mind or is it the body’, you will be moving like a puppet from one side to the other at the mercy of the dualism or the split. In our experience it really takes four to five months before the clinicians really start to sit comfortably with a non-split view. So the first thing is developing and absorbing a whole person concept that is unshakeable in the face of the patient’s worry and the potential criticism of one’s colleagues.
The second thing is that it is one thing to have an adequate conceptual framework, but it is another thing to know what to do in the hurly-burly or mayhem of a clinic that is running as usual. So a lot of the course is about going through role-plays, skills training, how to listen, what to listen for, how to introduce yourself, how to open things up, how to hold things in such a way so that in the next session it is still all there and hasn’t vanished. All that kind of stuff gets talked through and worked through role-plays from different disciplinary perspectives. A lot of the role-play is around learning to listen and to listen properly. Instead of looking for more and more information and keeping on the surface the students (who are all experienced clinicians) learn to go deeper with the little bit of information they already have. So the second thing is gradually developing skills in how to operate in your own disciplinary perspective.
In terms of the course itself, it is a block course. So we have 8 block courses over 2 years and those block courses are two and half days each. The students are seeing the teachers every two months essentially each academic year and are in contact with the teachers by online, byemail and telephone and by assignments. They come from all over New Zealand. We normally have 12 to 16 postgraduate students at any time.
Find more information here: https://www.aut.ac.nz/study-at-aut/study-areas/health-sciences/postgraduate-study/mindbody-healthcare
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