Greer Neil attended Exposure Therapy for Anxiety in August. It was held in Brisbane through the AASW.

This course highlighted how debilitating anxiety is and reminded Greer of how difficult it is for many of our clients returning to the workforce faced with anxiety. The course acknowledged the 5 ways that people deal with things that make them anxious: avoidance, distraction, control, reassurance-seeking, hypervigilance. It suggested that whilst these are normal responses, they don’t work in the long term and actually can make the anxiety worse and the fear increases. It was powerful to see in role play ‘exposure’ therapy being demonstrated and made sense that by actually doing the things that you’re anxious about enough times, it stops it from being frightening. There are various exposure therapy techniques to use depending upon the client.  Overall, great training!

Richard Robilliard attended the ALUCA PD Day in the AMP building, Circular Quay on the last day of August. It was a great morning with three engaging speakers who were highly entertaining and very informative. Oh yes, and there was one AI bot – Jibo who won over all of us!

Dr Raghav Murali-Ganesh was the first speaker and gave us a very polished presentation on CancerAid. This is a fantastic app and is now the no. 1 cancer management and support App in Australia, the UK and the US. Rohan O’Rielly (Smart Bodies Smarter Minds) spoke about his clinic near Newcastle that utilises Virtual Reality to help stimulate neural activity in patients with neurological conditions. Aamer Fattah talked to us about his AI bot Jibo and gave us a demonstration of how he can respond to conversation, tell jokes and dance on request.