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09/28/2026 - Mental Health Community of Practice
Monday, September 28, 2026, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM EDT
Category: Events

09/28/2026 - SIS Virtual Event - Mental Health Community of Practice

Title: When Problem Solving Isn't Solving the Problem: New Ways to Navigate Challenges in Everyday Life

Members - FREE

Non-Members - $20

REGISTER HERE! 

Date & Time: September 28, 2026 7:00pm-8:00pm EST

 

Location: Virtual Meeting via Zoom

 

Number of Contact Hours: 1.0

 

Summary of Event: 

Challenges encountered in mental health practice often emerge from complex situations that do not lend themselves to traditional problem-solving approaches. Drawing on a pragmatist perspective, this session explores inquiry as a way of navigating uncertainty, using imagination to envision possibilities and experimentation to learn from action. Clinical examples will demonstrate how this approach can be used to guide occupational therapy assessment and intervention across settings.

  

Speaker(s): 

Tessa L. Boston, PhD, OTR/L

 

Bio/Background of the Speaker(s):  

Tessa is an occupational scientist and therapist with a background in
community mental health. She works at the Yale School of Medicine on the Young Adult Service at the Connecticut Mental Health Center and is a part-time faculty member at the University of Hartford. Her research uses qualitative and community-engaged methods to explore communal occupations that include people with serious mental illness, with particular attention to the contexts that shape participation in community life and the implications for clinical practice and community development.

 

 Learning Objectives

By the end of this session, participants will:

1. Identify limitations of traditional problem-solving approaches for complex challenges in mental health practice.

2. Explain how a pragmatist perspective can help occupational therapists rethink their approach to problems and possibilities.

3. Apply inquiry, imagination, and experimentation strategies to assessment and intervention in clinical scenarios.