Stanford execs in Cebu for depression lectures

Cebu City will be the site of two major events when one of America’s most distinguished and renowned psychiatrists, Dr. David Spiegel, professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, will be the guest speaker at ‘The Spiegel Lectures’, a series of seminars the doctor will deliver for two different audiences: the lay public and the medical community.

The topic of the public lectures will be “Mind and Body Medicine – Concepts and Practice”; that for the doctors will be “Stress in Health and Illness.”

Both sessions will deal with emotional and physical illnesses with an emphasis on depression and are scheduled on the morning and afternoon, respectively, of September 23rd at the Cebu Doctors’ University Auditorium.

A distinguished team of Stanford officials accompanying Spiegel arrived in Cebu from Hong Kong last Saturday morning. Officers of the Natasha Goulbourn Foundation, who also flew in from Manila, met them.

The foundation is hosting the ‘The Spiegel Lectures’, which are free with the sessions for lay people open to the public. The foundation requests interested parties to come early as seats are on a first-come-first served basis. The foundation will also distribute pamphlets and flyers on depression to the audience.

A public lecture will also be held at the Santuario de San Antonio Parish Center in Makati on the morning of September 25 and Spiegel will reprise the lecture for doctors on the afternoon of the same day at The Medical City auditorium in Pasig. An exclusive lecture for invited medical specialists from the various hospitals in Metro Manila and practicing clinical psychologists on the topic “Stress, HPA and Cancer Survival” will take place on the morning of September 24 also at The Medical City Auditorium.

Besides Spiegel, the Stanford team in Cebu consists of Ms Barbara Ralston, Vice President of Stanford International Medical Services, Ms Nora Cain, Stanford’s Chief Librarian, Dr Rita Ghatak, a renowned export on aging and the care for the agent, particularly Alzheimer’s Disease sufferers, Dr Harry Oberhelman, Medical Director of Stanford International Medical Services, and Ms Fiorenza Lukas, of International Special Patient Services Stanford University Medical Center. Meeting them were Dr. Ricky Soler, over-all chair of the lectures’ steering committee and foundation trustees, Katrina G. Feist and Frances Lim.

An official of the foundation describes Dr. Spiegel as being “among the most eminent American psychiatrists and one of the research scientists who helped develop the treatment modality now known as ‘mind-body medicine, a healing approach that takes into account the interactions between the spirit, brain, mind, body and behavior and the powerful ways these factors directly affect health and healing.”

Dr. Spiegel, according to the official Stanford resume for him, also pressed for patient care to take into account a long overlooked area - compassionate supportive care for the medically ill which does not make the error of teaching patients that survival is simply ‘mind over matter’. His research has shown, however, that mind matters.

Among Spiegel’s principles is the importance among sick people in forming strong bonds of mutual support, facing fears of dying and death directly; reordering life priorities; managing relationships with family, friends, and physicians; and, learning to control pain and other symptoms with self-hypnosis. Dr. Spiegel has long had an interest in the use of hypnosis as treatment for medical symptoms and treatment side effects.

He and his father, Herbert Spiegel, M.D., co-authored what is now the standard textbook on the clinical uses of hypnosis, Trance and Treatment.

The Natasha Goulbourn Foundation is a non-profit organization whose sole mission is to disseminate information about depression. It seeks to inform and educate the public as extensively as possible about this condition. This process helps demystify and eliminate the stigma for mental disorder and promotes integrative mainstream and complementary medical approaches in treating depression.

The foundation holds that many do not know what depression is and suffer in silence or in shame. It posits that informing them about it, as it is doing through these Spiegel Lectures, is a worthy first step in helping understand and manage this dreadful condition.

The foundation is also holding a seminar on depression on October 26, 2008 in Hong Kong to address the alarming situation of depression and consequent suicide incidences among the over 150,000 OFWs there. Based on WHO equations, there is a shocking possibility that as many as 14,000 of the 150,000 OFWs in Hong Kong could be suffering from depression. (PR)