This course is designed for healthcare professionals wishing to learn more about the mood disorders. The emphasis is on the symptoms and the experience of mood disorders, rather than on causes or treatment strategies. Much of the course is geared toward diagnosis, using the formal manual criteria to evaluate client behavior and reported symptoms in the clinical setting.
Major Depressive Episode - Separated into lectures on a) the critical mood-related criteria, and b) the remaining criteria.
Diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder.
Nondiagnostic experiential aspects of the depression experience; and an examination of the manner in which symptoms self-perpetuate and magnify one another ("snowballs and reverberations").
Bipolar disorders - Including strategies for diagnosis of manic and hypomanic episodes, bipolar 1 and 2 disorder, and cyclothymia.
Other mood disorders - Including premenstrual dysphoric disorder and the array of "miscellaneous" categories for individuals who do not meet criteria for the primary syndromes.
Epidemiology - A brief consideration of issues such as gender ratio, age of onset, cost of mood disorders to society, and the possibility that mood disorders are increasing in prevalence.
Randy Paterson is the Director of Changeways Clinic, a private mental health center, and author of How to be Miserable, The Assertiveness Workbook, Private Practice Made Simple, and Your Depression Map. He is also the lead author of the Changeways Core Program, one of the world's most widely used group therapy treatment protocols for depression. He presents workshops for professional mental health providers across Canada and internationally.
