Warwick Middleton holds an appointment as Associate Professor in Psychiatry, University of Queensland.  He has made substantial and ongoing contributions to the bereavement and trauma literatures and with Dr Jeremy Butler authored the first published series in the Australian scientific literature detailing the abuse histories and clinical phenomenology of patients fulfilling diagnostic criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder.  • More about Dr Warwick Middleton

OVERVIEW

This seminar seeks to contextualise dissociation in the spectrum of ways in which individuals and societies seek to distance themselves from, or to not know about individual and collective trauma. The evolution of the human brain is based on how life really is rather than on how we'd like to believe it to be. Part of society's distancing itself from trauma is to reassign those symptoms or syndromes that result from trauma to paradigms that emphasise other, less confronting, aetiologies. Maintaining a personal strategy which emphasises, clear thinking, objectivity and the use of meaningful metaphor while at the same time avoiding going beyond verifiable data in theory and clinical practice, is a necessary requirement for those who choose to work with the complexities of personal trauma. Such considerations form a backdrop to the elaboration of the course, treatment options and outcomes for those suffering complex trauma/dissociative disorders.

The 8 sessions will cover the following topics:

• Dissociation & Other Mechanisms of Not Knowing
• The Surviving Brain
• The Nature of the Dissociative Individual
• Dissociative Disorders and the Construct of Schizophrenia
• Therapy: Staging and Objectives
• Therapy: Techniques, Challenges and Outcomes
• Remembering Trauma
• Seeking a Better Frame of Reference