David Hellerstein, M.D., professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City, will visit UNMC to deliver the Linda & Charles Wilson Lecture in Medical Humanities.
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David Hellerstein, M.D. |
Dr. Hellerstein’s research includes combining placebo-controlled antidepressant trials with MRI scanning and novel therapeutic agents, including psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and the allopregnanolone derivative (ganaloxone) for postpartum depression.
Dr. Hellerstein has received national recognition for his literary writing. His books include “Battles of Life and Death,” a collection of essays about medical training, and two novels, “Loving Touches” and “Stone Babies.”
His memoir, “A Family of Doctors,” published in 1994, recounts the story of five generations of physicians in his family beginning in 1863 in Omaha. Dr. Hellerstein’s most recent book, “Heal Your Brain: How the New Neuropsychiatry Can Help You Go from Better to Well,” was praised by New York Times columnist Dr. Richard Friedman as “remarkable.”
He is expected to discuss: his essay collection, “Mindset,” which explores the experiences of patients and clinicians during three eras of psychiatric discovery and disruptive change; psychoanalysis, the dominance of the “Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders;” and the advent of clinical neuroscience.
For more than a decade, Dr. Hellerstein has taught creative nonfiction writing to medical students in Columbia’s narrative medicine program. Essays written by Dr. Hellerstein’s students have been published in The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Box lunches will be provided to the first 30 attendees.