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All right, everyone. Hey, welcome [00:01:00] back.
For the past few years, I have been out of the conference game. COVID certainly played a role in that, but honestly, I struggle with conferences. Most of them are too big, too crowded, too packed, full of sessions, and honestly, too theoretical with less applied information than I would like so much so that I created my own anti-conference, the Crafted Practice Business Retreat for testing folks.
That said, something is calling me this spring to check out some conferences again. So today I’m highlighting two of the favorites that are coming up over the next two months, along with specific agenda sessions that I’m personally interested in. So if you’ve been away from the conference game for a while, maybe this is the spring that you get back into it.
If you’re a business owner of a testing practice and you would like some support on the business side, which [00:02:00] many of us need, I would invite you to go to thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. I do individual and group consulting to help folks at all stages of practice development. I would love to chat with you and see if consulting could be a good fit. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting.
All right everybody, let’s dive right into it. I’m going to talk about two conferences coming up; the AAPDN conference and the AACN conference. I’ve historically gravitated more toward business conferences than clinical conferences, but when I go clinical, I tend to go for the neuropsychological conferences more than APA.
The two that I like most are [00:03:00] AAPDN and AACN because they seem to be more clinically focused and honestly, easier to apply to my actual practice versus the more theoretical events that might be more research-driven in the session content. I’m looking at both of these conferences this year after being out of the game for a while and wanted to highlight them here for anyone else who might be looking, or maybe he’s on the fence, or it’s fallen off the radar. It’s hard to get testing-related CEs and both of these are great options. So if that’s your only angle, then it works in that regard. But there are some legitimately cool sessions at each of these conferences that I’m excited about. So let’s go ahead and dig into it.
The AAPDN conference is coming up soon. It is April 19th through the 21st. It is physically located in [00:04:00] Costa Mesa, California. I had to look that up. I’m not from California. It is South of LA between Newport Beach and Irvine. So if you want to get to Southern California in April which is never a bad reason to go to a conference, this might be your jam.
Format. It is both virtual and in-person, so you’ve got your choice, and the cost is $329 for members and $399 for non-members. This does not include travel or lodging or anything like that. It’s just conference registration.
Here are the sessions that are grabbing my attention. Of course, there is no shade to any not mentioned here. These are the ones that seem to line up most with my areas of practice and interest.
The first one is Updates on COVID-19. The title of this workshop was [00:05:00] vague but also quite intriguing. In a previous episode this month, I believe, I did a research review talking about the impact of COVID on learning. And so, I firmly believe that we’re going to see more and more research coming out as far as the impact of COVID. I’m really curious to hear what might be going on there.
The next workshop that caught my attention was on the psychopharmacology of ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The main thing here is… I’m curious to see if we have any advances or changes. This is one of those topics that, for me at least, is easy to just get stuck in whatever I learned in grad school or a few years after. I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t pay a ton of attention to psychopharmacological research unless a big-name medication comes out and my psychiatrist friends start talking about it. [00:06:00] So I would love to check this out just to get an update on the landscape of psychopharmacology and some neurodevelopmental disorders.
The next one that looks interesting is demystifying AI in healthcare. This is a no-brainer. The presenter is a physician, so I’m really curious how he is going to come at this topic and hope that he may bring some fresh perspectives from the medical realm that we may not be thinking of here in the neuropsych or mental health realm.
And then the last one that jumped out to me was the Culturally Attuned ADHD Assessment. I am super interested in anything in this realm, anything culturally attuned, and culturally responsive. It’s an ongoing evolving area of research. Again, something that I touched on in the research review from the episode earlier this month on how we have problems with [00:07:00] generalizability in our research, and marginalized groups are continuing to be marginalized in a lot of our testing research and development. So yes, anything in this realm is catching my attention. So might check out this workshop on culturally attuned ADHD assessment.
Those are just a few that caught my attention from the AAPDN conference and the link in the show notes to check out the conference and the agenda and perhaps attend yourself.
Let’s transition to the AACN conference. Now, coincidentally, this was the last conference that I attended actually, and it was a long time ago, too long. So let’s go through the details for AACN.
The location is in Scottsdale, Arizona. June 5th through the 8th. Now, I will say this, my mother-in-law lives in [00:08:00] Scottsdale, and June 5th through the 8th could be pushing it just a little bit in terms of temperature. It’s going to be pretty warm, but it is at a beautiful resort hotel. If you go in person, you will have a pool to relax by if you would like. It’s a big motivator for me, to be honest.
This conference also offers in-person and virtual formats. So you can choose to stay at home or travel to Scottsdale. The cost, it looks like the early bird rate has passed, but registration is currently $500 for members and $575 for non-members.
Just a side note. I feel like the registration for either of these events is very reasonable. For AAPDN, you get essentially two days of sessions, for about $400 for AACN, you get three days of sessions for $575. That’s pretty reasonable.
[00:09:00] All right. Lots of sessions here catch my eye.The first one that I want to mention is a workshop from Dr. Mike Kirkwood on Functional Neurological Disorder. Mike is in Denver at Colorado Children’s and a well-established researcher and clinician who’s always putting out good stuff. I’m really curious to hear his take on Functional Neurologic Disorder. This is a concern that’s coming up more and more frequently in our practice and is a perplexing issue. So I’m excited to hear what Mike has to say.
There’s another workshop on lesser-utilized PVTs and SVTs. This realm is another realm that I feel like we cannot do enough research in to gauge effort in our assessment sessions. These are those measures that[00:10:00] help us understand if clients are putting forth optimal or suboptimal effort and what to do about it. So really curious to hear about advances, especially lesser-utilized ones. I think we all know the big ones, the TOMM, the MSVT, and the PdPVTS, but curious to hear what these lesser-utilized PVTs and SVTs might be.
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The Neuropsychological Assessment Battery or NAB is a comprehensive instrument offering the combined strengths of a flexible and fixed neuropsychological battery. It lets you administer the full battery, any of its six modules, or individual tests. And now the NAB modules are available for scoring on PARiConnect- PAR’s online assessment [00:12:00] platform. Learn more at parinc.com\nab.
Let’s get back to the podcast.
Another one that looks interesting to me is navigating sports-related concussion evaluation and proactive management. I don’t do a lot of this work by any means, but it is personally relevant. I have two kids in sports and they could frankly get concussions at any moment. My son plays soccer relatively competitively and my daughter is a relatively competitive gymnast and head injuries are a risk in each of those activities. So I’m personally interested in this topic, not to mention all the kids that I work with in our practice who might be worried about concussions.
The next one that I am interested in is, are we loosening the definition of disability from Dr. Rob Mapu. [00:13:00] Rob has been on my podcast. I have a lot of respect for his work and his perspectives. He is incidentally doing another talk on the assessment of ADHD in older adolescents and adults that also looks interesting here at the same conference, but I’m curious how he has updated the material since his book was published on the same topic, maybe 10-12 years ago.
I’m also curious about what he has to say about loosening the definition of disability. I think this is a very relevant topic at this point as we see an ever-expanding umbrella for what qualifies as a disability or disorder and somewhat variable or diffuse diagnostic liberties. So a hot topic in our field right now.
Let’s see. Another one that looks great, I’ll just keep going, is recruiting diverse trainees. This is very relevant for us given that we’re an APIC [00:14:00] site for doctoral internships and a postdoc site in an area that sorely needs Spanish language evaluations. We are always looking for particularly Spanish language-speaking trainees who are pre-licensed folks. For that reason, this is very intriguing to me.
Let’s see. Another workshop that’s looking good is gender-affirming neuropsychology. I think this is pretty self-explanatory and dovetails with culturally attuned ADHD assessment. Like I said, anything in this realm is highly compelling at this point given the number of folks who are coming through our practice that might fit under the gender-affirming model.
All right. Another one that’s standing out is the new care model implementation of innovative pediatric neuropsych services. I don’t know [00:15:00] what this might be about, but I love anything “innovative” and thinking outside the box. I would love to see what these presenters come up with in this presentation; new care models that are implementing innovative pediatric neuropsych services.
Another workshop here on responsibly using AI. And then the next one, just going down the list. There are a lot. I’m excited about this conference, but the next one is tech and innovation in neuropsychological testing with Dr. Robert Builder and others. He’s been in this game for a long time, researching tech and software and neuropsychological testing. I would love to hear what he has to say about technology at this point in time.
The last one is another COVID workshop. It’s about the impact of COVID-19 on kids, acute illness, and long COVID. [00:16:00] Again, I’ll take pretty much anything I can get regarding long COVID info as we are figuring out more by the day. And specifically with kids, that’s my population of interest right now.
I hope that these descriptions might get some of you excited about these events. I am undecided about going in person versus virtual for these events. If anything, I’ll be at AACN in person because again, I have family in that area and we can combine the trip and see some family and make it a family thing instead of me going away for a weekend.
So, if you’re going to be in person, drop it in The Testing Psychologist Community on Facebook, or shoot me a message, at jeremy@thetestingpsychologist.com. It would be fantastic. It’s always fantastic to meet up with people in person if at all possible. So let me know if you’re going to be at either [00:17:00] of these conferences.
All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so make sure to check those out.
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We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. [00:18:00] You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
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Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here. Similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners [00:19:00] of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your needs.