mindfulness

College counseling centers (CCCs) have unique needs which influence what kinds of groups are offered and how groups are run. With limited resources and the need for a time-limited treatment model, coupled with increasingly severe and complex problems among the student population, effective short-term interventions are necessary. Because of the variety of presenting problems for which students seek help, it can be difficult to compose a group with members who share a common diagnosis. In fact, it is much more likely and common that group members will carry a variety of diagnoses.

A steady flow of new and emerging research continues to suggest that mindfulness offers great benefits to health and well-being. It shifts the nature of our relationship to experience and we now know that cultivating an even-handed and openhearted stance toward life can strengthen emotional balance, resilience, and interpersonal effectiveness; skills we can all use throughout our lives in and beyond the classroom.

Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology: The Seven Foundations of Well-Being, is the first book to successfully integrate key elements of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and positive psychology to promote healthy functioning in clients.

Over the past several weeks we’ve reviewed both the alarming rates of mental health issues among college students and presented some of the ways researchers are currently testing to apply mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions in college counseling centers.

A new study published in the latest issue of Research in Human Development, “The Effectiveness of the Learning to BREATHE Program on Adolescent Emotion Regulation” (Metz, Frank, Reibel, Cantrell, Sanders, and Broderick, 2013), assessed the effectiveness of Learning to BREATHE (L2B), the mindfulness-based program for adolescent emotion regulation that is outlined in one of this summer’s most exciting new titles, Learning To BREATHE: A Mindfulness Curriculum for Adolescents to Cultiv