​Clinical Psychology Ph.D. students are offering a Self-Care Workshop for all graduate students on 7 April 2016 from 11-2pm (RSVP c.belu@unb,ca) or on April 14 from 4pm-7pm (RSVP to alyssa.mabey@UNB.ca). This workshop will be in Snodgrass Lounge in Keirstead Hall. This workshop is free of charge but pre-registration is requested due to space limitations. Please e-mail c.belu@unb.ca by 4 April 2016. These workshops will be offered all summer and fall but if there is a certain time that works best for you please let us know.

​Volunteers

Needed!
 
We are investigating the relationship between aspects of health and romantic relationship well-being, and are looking for volunteers to complete a series of questionnaires.
 
If you are Canadian and at least 18 years old, or American and at least 21 years old, you are eligible to participate. Since the questionnaires can be done online, the study is open to all consenting adults.
 
In the questionnaires you will be asked for a little bit of information about you (e.g., age, gender), any persistent health conditions you may experience, your relationships, and your feelings about yourself. It will take about 30 minutes to complete the questionnaires. Participation is voluntary and all information you choose to share will be kept confidential. All participants will be entered in a draw to receive a $10 honorarium (i.e., a gift card) for their time.
 
If you are interested in learning more about the study please go to the study website at: https://survey.psyc.unb.ca/HealthAndRelationships.aspx, click below or contact Lyndsay Crump (doctoral student in clinical psychology), Rehabilitation Psychology Research Laboratory (University of New Brunswick) at rehablabUNB@gmail.com. Please note that getting more information about this study does not obligate you to participate. This project has received ethics approval from the University of New Brunswick (REB 2015-120).

Talking about pain is a challenge for most people.  By sharing some of the discussions that happen in our lab (often questions asked by volunteers or junior students), we're hoping to spread a little knowledge and spark further debate on some important issues for persons with pain.  Stay tuned for more lab updates and info-sharing!

​Megan: What are the challenges for young adults diagnosed with chronic illness in terms of acceptance?

Dr. Diane LaChapelle: Acceptance is an interesting process depending on when you’re diagnosed, because what you have to accept is quite different.  In young people, the challenge is in that what they have to accept is different opportunities for where their life can go based on their illness.  They’re accepting limited options potentially, but also potentially limiting themselves unnecessarily based on their illness.  For adults who are established in their life, what they’re accepting is changes to who they are.  For young people, their identity is still forming, so they need to incorporate that illness into their forming identity.  I’m not sure that it’s even an acceptance process so much as an additional factor that influences how your identity develops in the first place.
Chris (MA/PhD student Clinical Psychology): When you get a chronic illness as an adult and start losing those pieces of your identity - you can’t go hunting with your friends, or go for runs - you start to lose part of yourself and as a result of those losses you have to grieve. You are losing a big part of yourself.  With kids and adolescents, because they’re developing those parts, they’re trying things on, seeing what they like, they can almost fashion their identity so it’s still what they want but they’re not going through that painful loss process.
Diane: Children with a chronic illness incorporate it into their identity quite successfully, and probably better than adults. 
Kirsten (PhD student Clinical Psychology): The closer you are to having a fully formed identity, having these goals… when you get chronic pain you have to realize what worked before, the person I was before that did x, y, and z, doesn’t work anymore, so I have to reformulate.  I need to come up with a new normal, they need to come up with that and what that means to them.  So I think no matter your age, the closer you are to having a fully formed identity, the bigger the challenge will be because the bigger the change will have to be from old to new. 
Lyndsay (PhD student Clinical Psychology): This new normal also needs to extend into their expectations for who they should be.  Self-discrepancy theory fits really nicely here. We have three views of ourselves: our current self, the self we should be (tied to duties and responsibilities) and the self we aspire or hope to be (ideal self).  With pain, people need to not just adjust their view of their current self, but need to adjust other selves as well.  When they don’t, these expectations of what they should be and who they hope to be really cause problems - it’s like there’s an impossible standard that isn’t achievable.  That can happen at any age as well, but it’s harder to adjust existing goals than it is to incorporate pain into the goals in the first place.