Conference Director: Spencer Biel, PsyD is the Director of the Austen Riggs Center Remote Access Intensive Outpatient Program for College Students and Emerging Adults. He has a private practice in Chicago, Illinois, where he is also on the Clinical Associate Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis.

Speakers and Moderators:

• Lisa Amato, LICSW works primarily in Holyoke and Amherst, Massachusetts as a community-based, school-based, and private practice therapist. Her clinical work focuses largely on relationship and attachment in the treatment of trauma, depression, and anxiety. She incorporates fundamentals and principles from multiple psychodynamic schools of thought and supplements these ideas with skills from CBT, EMDR, relational, and narrative therapy. Lisa Amato works to guide her clients in building on their strengths and in shaping the direction of their own healing and empowerment. 
• Erik Ewers Erik Ewers has worked with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns — as Ewers likes to say — “ever
  since ‘The Civil War.’” For more than 30 years, Erik has edited nearly all Burns’s single and multi-episodic films
  including Baseball, Jazz, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, Unforgivable
  Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, The National Parks, Mark Twain, Prohibition, The
  Roosevelts, The War, The Vietnam War, and serving as senior editor on Country Music, and
  Hemingway. Erik has been nominated for more than seven personal and program Emmy Awards and was
  awarded one editing Emmy and three program-series Emmys, as well as two prestigious ACE
  Eddie Award nominations and one ACE Award for “Best Edited Documentary of 2015.”
  Erik is co-director and senior editor at Ewers Brothers Productions, a preferred collaborative
  company in the co-creation of Ken’s films. Ewers Brothers co-directed with Ken to create the
  two-hour film The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science, which broadcast on PBS in 2018, and their
  partnership continued with the June 2022 broadcast of the film series, Hiding in Plain Sight:
  Youth Mental Illness. Currently, Erik is at work with Burns, Florentine Films, and Ewers Brothers Productions on a
  sequel to their 2022 film on America’s adult mental health crisis, and a 2-hour film on the life
  and legacy of 19th century writer and environmentalist Henry David Thoreau.
• Katie Lewis, PhD serves as the Director of Research at the Austen Riggs Center. Her research examines interpersonal behaviors, personality processes, and suicidal ideation in adult psychiatric patients using experience sampling methodology. Dr. Lewis received a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University. In the past, she has served as the graduate student representative on the Ethics Board of Division 39 and as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Her research has been supported by the Robert Wallerstein Fellowship in Psychoanalytic Research, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and the Division 39 Marsha McCary Fund for Psychoanalysis. She has published and presented on a wide range of topics, including suicide and self-harming behaviors, personality psychopathology and assessment, and the ethics of confidentiality in clinical writing. She currently serves as a Consulting Editor and Section Editor for the Journal of Personality Assessment.  
• Michelle Marchese, LICSW is the Director of Counseling Services at Smith College, and feels lucky to be a part of such a stellar clinical team. Michelle also runs a small group private practice that focuses on trauma recovery. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Smith School for Social Work and is researching the efficacy of dissociation scales for transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people; qA and EMDR for race-based traumatic stress. Michelle is an EMDR certified consultant and an adjunct professor in the MSW program at the Smith School for Social Work.
• Seth Pitman, PhD is the Associate Director of the Austen Riggs Remote Access Intensive Outpatient Program. He has provided psychodynamic and integrative psychotherapy services at psychiatric hospitals, community mental health centers, and a university-based clinic, in both individual and group formats. He has also been trained in neuropsychological testing and consultation-liaison psychology services. Dr. Pitman’s peer-reviewed research articles have focused on the relationship between psychodynamic techniques and therapy outcome, the impact of patient personality factors on the therapeutic process, and trauma. His original research has earned him recognition from APA’s Division 29–Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training.
• Erin Seery, MD is a psychiatrist in the Remote Access Intensive Outpatient Program for College Students in Massachusetts at the Austen Riggs Center. She is a board-certified psychiatrist with active medical licenses in Massachusetts and South Carolina. After completing psychoanalytic fellowship at the Austen Riggs Center, Dr. Seery joined the faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina. She practices in a variety of settings within MUSC and was recently named an Associate Program Director of the psychiatry residency program. Dr. Seery teaches psychodynamic psychotherapy and is committed to fostering a patient-centered approach to care by future psychiatrists.

Austen Riggs Center Inc. confirms that Conference Director, Speakers and Moderators named above nor anyone involved in the planning of the CME event, has disclosed a potential conflict of interest. 

The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the Austen Riggs Center.