On June 23 and 24, Ellenhorn and The Menninger Clinic will partner to host “The Crowning Fortune of Purpose,” a conference and workshop aimed at allowing the often-neglected issue of purposelessness to enter and inform our work. 

The conference will be a hybrid event, taking place both virtually and in-person on Thursday, June 23, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, Calif. The panel of speakers will be practitioners who are experts in the field of community integration. Presentation topics include “Emerging from the Shadows of Mental Illness: The Transformative Power of Finding Meaning and Purpose”, “The Power of Purpose: Peer Perspectives on Meaning Making”, “Finding Our Way: Using Values to Find Purpose, Identity and a Life Worth Living”, “Purpose: The Driving Force in Motivation, Efficiency and Efficaciousness, Metabolizing Help and Building a Relationship with One’s Own Suffering” and “Compassionate Professional Renewal (CPR): Connecting to Purpose”.

Conference attendees will have the opportunity to earn 5.5 contact/credit/clock hours upon completion of this conference. 

A half-day workshop will also take place on Friday, June 24 at the Skirball Cultural Center. It will be offered exclusively to in-person conference attendees and will focus on challenging providers to examine their principles and strategies for helping people who live with serious mental-health conditions, and, at the same time, challenge them to broaden their psychosocial-rehabilitation methods to include those that invite and offer activation of hope, a willingness to try and the discovery of new meaning and valued roles. Attendees will have the opportunity to earn 3.5 contact/credit/clock hours upon completion of the workshop. Attendees who complete both the conference and the workshop will receive a total of nine continuing-education credits. 

Purpose organizes you and gives you meaning. It’s like the trunk of a tree from which branch your personal goals, your identity, the way you form and hold onto your relationships, and your world view. Without purpose, life lacks coherence and the world can appear disassembled and chaotic, like floating dust in the light. To put it in the context of modern life, purpose is both your idea of a destination and your GPS; when you lack it, you’re lost. From a longer life span and better health to greater resilience and the ability to act efficiently, the physiological and psychological results of a strong sense of purpose are innumerable. A sense of purpose, however, is not merely a matter of knowing where you’re going in life. It also has to do with your sense of your value to other people in your life and the community at large. “What’s my purpose here on earth?” is a question about whether–and how–you will add value to your family, community, country or planet. It’s a question with difficult and painful parallel queries: “Do I matter?” and “Does my absence matter?”

Of all the social injuries experienced by psychiatric patients—from stigma and ostracism to the loss of social support and self-determination— purposelessness is the constant. In fact, there is a rough correlation between treatment and purposelessness: The more treatment a person receives and the more they spend their days in treatment, the less time or energy they have to create purpose and live accordingly. This raises the possibility that we might be contributing to purposelessness by the very act of treating the results of lacking purpose. In other words: “low motivation,” “treatment noncompliance” and a supposed lack of “life skills” are actually signs that a person has no map for the future, rather than problems that require more psychiatric and psychological interventions.

Here enters community-integration work, which focuses on helping a person reintegrate into the world and places their life goals front and center in their pursuit of change. This year’s community-integration conference seeks to help attendees appreciate purpose in its rightful place as the “crowning fortune” in our lives, and more specifically, in the lives of the people who seek our help. 

For more information about attending whether in Los Angeles or virtually, for this exciting series.

For more information and to register, please visit www.communityintegrationseries.com