About this Course
This course will provide clinicians with the tools to tease out these various strands—autism, ADHD, trauma—to help them create more comprehensive treatment plans that enhance the overall well-being of their clients. Devised from the perspective of a “beginner’s mind”—that is, as someone willing to abandon preconceived ideas and embrace new ones—this course will provide new approaches to assessment, referral, and intervention selection based on differential diagnosis process using the lenses of Polyvagal Theory, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Executive Function, and Diagnosis (PMED). For instance, research emphasizes the frequency of gold-standard autism diagnosis tools misdiagnosing PTSD as Autism at a rate of 25-35%, resulting in poor intervention strategies being utilized. Lenses like Polyvagal Theory, Executive Functioning, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and Diagnosis collaterally give clinicians an increased likelihood of success by parsing apart these diagnostic subtleties. This process allows clinicians to match solutions to symptom presentations in a higher likelihood of improved quality of life by matching likelier diagnosis with evidence based solutions rooted in research literature.
