National Grand Rounds: Neuroscience of Stress and Resiliency
(11:00 – 12:00 CT, 10:00 – 11:00 MT, 9:00 – 10:00 PT)
The National Capacity Building (NCB) Project at the Center for Victims of Torture and the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma is pleased to announce a special training series, “Clinical Care of Survivors of Torture, National Grand Rounds”. The National Grand Rounds is free to attend and all health and mental health practitioners will receive CEUs. Physicians, psychologists, social workers, and non-clinical personnel will receive a certificate of participation.
Presenter: Gregory Fricchione, MD
Date: June 26th, 2025
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM ET
(11:00 – 12:00 CT, 10:00 – 11:00 MT, 9:00 – 10:00 PT)
Description:
Significant practice gaps exist for the Survivors of Torture (SOT) treatment programs and their clinicians caring for torture survivors.
SOT clinicians do not have familiarity with the neuroscience of stress and resiliency in the diagnosis and treatment of torture survivors and their family members. Understanding how the brain and body are impacted by stress leading to acute emotional and behavioral problems and chronic disease is crucial in patients who have experienced extreme violence and torture. Learning how to evaluate and implement a stress and resiliency analysis in the clinical care of torture survivors is crucial to maximizing the therapeutic impact on the patient.
Untreated chronic stress can lead to serious behavioral health problems as well as lead to life threatening stress related illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. Additionally, SOT clinicians need to have a better understanding of the neuroscience of the intergenerational impact of extreme violence on the children of survivors and how to diagnosis and treat this intergenerational transmission.
Who should attend? This program is intended for psychologists, physicians, nurses, social workers, and other staff who treat survivors of torture and refugee populations.
Learning Objectives
- This course is designed to help explain the relationship between stress and neurobiology and the importance of resilience in preventing illness and to identify practices to promote resilience
- Upon completion of the activity, participants will be able to:
- Discuss the Mind Body Stress to Resilience Ratio and how it evolved.
- Describe the relationship of this ratio to the Hormetic Bell-Shaped Curve.
- Explain the importance of this relationship for our understanding of resilience and its importance for health promotion and illness prevention.
- Describe a Scalar Argument to support the hypothesis that mind body medicine is best understood in the context of a nested hierarchy of a continuum of networks; each level essentially replicates a self similar scaled version of the levels adjacent to it.
- Explain how understanding the neuroscience of stress can lead to clinical practices that can enhance a patient’s recovery from extreme violence.
More information on the series:
