Guns and Mental Health by Walk the Talk America

The WTTA clinical team addresses common misconceptions about the mental health field. In many instances, non-clinical people have widely divergent (and inaccurate) opinions on practices, treatment plans, diagnoses, insurance coverage, and confidentiality.

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In this episode, Jake dissects and explains the 10 core emotions inherent in every human being's brain. Understanding one's emotional functioning is critical not only to navigating life itself and all the stimuli we encounter as we move through the day, but it can also improve communication, intimacy, leadership, parenting, work ethic, patience, and so much more.

To learn more about this, please click here to watch Jake's emotional functioning video series. 

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Guest host Kevin Berry interviews Eddie Davenport in this episode, which lets the audience get to know a member of our clinical podcast team better. Eddie gets vulnerable in this conversation, telling us about his journey from a gun owner to a gun-owning therapist. 

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The WTTA clinical team, led this episode by Dr. DB Palmer, explores the concepts and foundations of one of counseling's oldest (but least understood) orientations: existential psychotherapy.

In this exploration, Dr. Palmer and the team discuss how to handle all sorts of life matters - including death - as viewed through the existential therapy lens. To learn more about this, we recommend reading books by Irvin Yalom, such as Love's Executioner, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, or anything by Rollo May.

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Dr. Christian Conte, creator of Yield Theory and one of the world's foremost anger management experts, joins the WTTA clinical team to discuss improving communication, avoiding conflict, and de-escalating potential problems.

Dr. Conte has written multiple books and workbooks, including Walking Through Anger, Advanced Techniques for Counseling and Psychotherapy, and 21 Days To Change Your Life.

His YouTube channel is full of free insights and skills, and his 60-second podcast provides pithy life lessons useful for anyone.  We invite you to subscribe to both. 

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Mike and Jake have a frank discussion with Russell Lemle and Aimee Johnson about their multiple decades of experience working with the veteran community and dispelling myths about veteran care within the VA system and how best to help someone who is in need.

Russell B. Lemle, PhD is a Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute Policy Director. He’s authored numerous scientific publications and media commentaries, and testified to Congress, on veterans’ health care and the prevention of firearm suicide, including in Guns & Ammo, The Hill, The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, Task & Purpose, and Federal Practitioner. From 1993 to 2019, he served as Chief Psychologist for the San Francisco VA Healthcare System.

Aimee Johnson, LCSW has over 20 years of experience as a clinical social worker. From direct clinical practice with youth, families, and adults in crisis working with military service members, Veterans, and their families, she has worked in the private sector and for the federal government, most recently at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She is considered a national subject matter expert on firearm suicide prevention and lethal means safety strategies, creating and launching media campaigns, building, leading, and implementing public-private partnerships, and leveraging innovation to bring new strategies to the field of suicide prevention. She owns and operates Aimee J Consulting.

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When presented with new information, sometimes we don't handle it in the best manner, which means sometimes we get defensive. 

But what are we defending?

We all try to maintain our worldview in a way that makes sense to us so when we get information that conflicts with the way we see things, our minds will deploy certain mechanisms. 

In this episode, Jake teaches about psychological defenses that often present in our lives, and how some of them can be helpful to us, while others can be harmful. The clinical team dissects and applies these concepts to the gun community.

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A year after first appearing on the show to tell us about being victimized by the New York SAFE Act, US Army Veteran Isaac Richey returns to give an update on the injunctive releif lawsuit he has filed against the State of New York. The ins and outs of the story are enough to make any reasonable person's blood boil, but hope exists for all those who cherish freedom and respect the rule of law, as Isaac shares his optimistic take on his story. If successful, his legal action could send a message to others who would use a temporary mental illness to revoke someone's civil rights: that liberty infringements simply due to being sick are totally unacceptable. 

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CBT has been around for more than six decades and although it is well known in the clinical counseling community, very few people outside the profession truly understand how it works - and more importantly - that they can use these skills without even coming into the therapy office. 

In this episode the clinical team explores the foundational concepts of this modality and shares why it works so well and underpins so many of the counseling techniques used in modern psychotherapy.

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Brandon Covey leads this episode, teaching us about EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Brandon is certified in EMDR and gives us a basic understanding of EMDR. Then he answers the group questions about this method that is commonly used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

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