February 3, 2020 Dinner Meeting: Wendy R. Dragon, Ph.D. “Fatphobia: Seeing our higher weight clients as more than a moral and health crisis”

Monday–February 3, 2020: “Fatphobia: Seeing our higher weight clients as more than a moral and health crisis”

2 CEUs for Licensed Psychologists: $55 CAPP members, $65 non-CAPP members, $30 students (no CEUs for student rate; student ID required)  

6:00 pm Social…6:20 pm Dinner…7:00-9:00 pm Program 

 Speaker: Wendy R. Dragon, PhD  

 Psychologists are expected to have an awareness of how our clients’ backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, and values effect their lives. This aspirational goal is an ever-changing construct, as our field recognizes an increasing number of clients’ variables that impact their lived experiences. Currently, most psychologists acknowledge the impact of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identification and religious variables on our clients’ lives and experiences. However, we often do not think about how living in a larger body may impact them. If we do recognize the difficulties that our larger bodied clients have, our response may be to suggest weight management. This response may further isolate and pathologize our clients. This presentation will explore the impact of fatphobia on our higher weight clients’ lives and will suggest some better guidelines for psychological care of clients in larger bodies. As part of this conversation, we will discuss diet culture and its impact on us as professionals and as humans.  

Objectives: 

• We will discuss weight as an aspect of human diversity. 
• We will review how societal weight stigma impacts our higher weight clients. 
• We will examine how society’s stigma around weight may impact our ability to see ourselves and our clients as fully actualized beings. 
• We will consider how we can begin to address our own stigma around weight as a moral and health issue.  
• We will explore what we need to do to provide better care to our higher weight clients. 

Dr. Wendy Dragon currently serves as an associate professor at Wright State University’s School of Professional Psychology (WSU-SOPP). She has presented nationally and internationally on issues of size stigma education. She has presented nationally about weight related topics, including treating size as a diversity variable and the impact of stigma on psychological and physical outcomes for our clients.  She has also presented on psychological interventions with and advocacy for clients in higher weight bodies. She is the advisor to the Size Acceptance and Body Liberation (SABL) group, a group of WSU-SOPP students interested in advocacy and scholarship about size stigma and client care for larger clients. She serves on and chairs dissertations around size acceptance, body liberation, and size stigma.  She currently serves as a co-coordinator for the Sizism Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology.  Her clinical work in this area focuses on health behaviors such as psychological health, balanced nutrition, and joyful movement in an environment of respectful care for clients in larger bodies. She believes that respect, not stigma, leads to better health and quality of life for all clients. In session, she focuses on addressing health without focusing on weight and healing clients’ relationships with their bodies. She also assists clients in learning how to care for their marginalized bodies.