- Mar
- 29
- 2023
A new mindfulness and guided imagery approach to facilitate mentalization and reduce depression in English and Spanish language family caregivers
This presentation will 1) Describe a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between mindfulness and mentalization (self-other understanding) 2) Explain how this framework underpins mentalizing imagery therapy (MIT); 3) Discuss acceptability of MIT for both English language (Latino and non-Latino) caregivers and Spanish language Latino caregivers; 4) Report clinical and neuroimaging evidence for the effects of MIT on (a) reducing depressive symptoms and stress and (b) improving mentalization and mindfulness in family caregivers; 5) Compare delivery modes of MIT via in-person, virtual and smartphone application approaches.
About Speaker
Dr. Felipe Jain, MD, is Director of Healthy Aging Studies at the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Depression Clinical and Research Program, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Director of the Psychopathology and Introduction to Clinical Psychiatry Course in the Harvard – Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Dr. Jain serves as a psychotherapy mentor for the Advanced Fellowship in Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and supervises psychiatry residents in the #1 ranked Massachusetts General Hospital-McLean psychiatry residency program. He graduated with an Sc.B. in neuroscience from Brown University, magna cum laude, and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, cum laude.
During psychiatry residency at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience, University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Jain was struck by the fact that most of the formal meditation he had done intensively since his early teenage years was self-focused: on his own mental processes, from his own internal perspective. While learning about principles of mentalization and attachment-based psychotherapy, he realized that several practices, including those based in mindfulness and deity yoga, could be adapted, combined, and secularized to focus on the minds of others and interpersonal dynamics. He used these insights to develop mentalizing imagery therapy (MIT), which he has been researching in NIH-funded trials and applying in clinical psychotherapy practice since 2010. Dr. Jain’s research has been funded by the Beeson K76 Emerging Leaders in Aging Research Career Development Award from the National Institute on Aging, the Morris A. Hazan Memorial Foundation, the Friends of the Semel Institute, and the Jerome and Celia Reich Scholar Award in Depression Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.