Reducing the Impact of Bias on Therapy, Education, & Training

Reducing the Impact of Bias on Therapy, Education, & Training is an interactive workshop that introduces participants to the concept of implicit bias, including what it is, why it happens, and how it affects our interactions with others. The workshop will specifically focus on examining how implicit bias impacts personal and professional interactions, its impact on client/customer/patient care in medical and mental health, business profitability, and education/training. Participants will learn ways to identify implicit biases and reduce its prevalence and impact.

The workshop will be facilitated by Dr. NiCole T. Buchanan, a highly accomplished speaker, writer, and scholar. Dr. Buchanan has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is now a Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, and the Clinical Director and Founder of Alliance Psychological Associates, PLLC in East Lansing, MI. She is also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, four separate divisions of the American Psychological Association. She has received numerous national and international awards for her research, teaching, clinical work, and professional service.

This workshop will focus on providers and educators in medical and mental health settings (formal and informal) and include ways innovative treatments, such as psychedelic-assisted therapy, can proactively work to reduce implicit bias and its negative impact on client trust, therapeutic alliance, and provider reputation. The facilitator will incorporate empirical research and real-world examples to create a learning environment that is engaging and where all participants, whether they are new to these concepts or have explored them thoroughly in the past, can increase comfort and competence working within and across diverse populations.

Workshop objectives include raising awareness of implicit bias and its development over time, understanding how implicit bias can compromise client/customer/patient care, outlining the costs associated with implicit bias and how it impacts education, business, medical and mental health practice, client care, provider-client trust and alliance, and learning in-the-moment face-to-face strategies for addressing bias.

This workshop was last held in the Fall of 2022.