Could not complete log in. Possible causes and solutions are:
Cookies are not set, which might happen if you've never visited this website before.
Please open https://avalon.lib.virginia.edu/ in a new window, then come back and refresh this page.
An ad blocker is preventing successful login.
Please disable ad blockers for this site then refresh this page.
Columbine. Virginia Tech. Ft. Hood. Huntsville. Tucson. Aurora. Newtown. The Navy Yard. Charleston. Roseburg. Gun violence, including a relentless raft of mass shootings, is epidemic today in the U.S., threatening individual safety and public health and wellbeing. The grim tally for 2015, says the Washington Post, is 294 mass shootings in 274 days. Many shooters are said to have undiagnosed or undertreated mental illness in their background.
How does psychopathology contribute to violent behavior, particularly involving firearms, over a person's life course and in the social environment? How accurate and useful are clinicians’ predictions of violence in their patients? What is an appropriate role for clinicians as “gun gatekeepers” and for mental health services generally, as part of a public-health solution to gun violence? This Medical Center Hour reviews research related to these urgent questions and explores implications for clinicians and other mental-health stakeholders.
Co-presented with the Institute for Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy and the School of Law, UVA
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
At a time of sweeping transitions in health care, medical students and young physicians are eager for guidance as to how best to apply their knowledge and skills in caring for patients. In clinical settings, and especially in primary care, who might be the best role models for young trainees to emulate? What skills and traits do the best clinicians use to create healing relationships with patients? How do clinicians become "healers" -that is, practitioners effective in making the patient-professional relationship itself have active therapeutic potential? Professor Larry Churchill and colleagues at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine have examined these matters, interviewing both clinicians and patients on the vital question of what actually makes for a therapeutic encounter, even in the context of a stressed and changing health care system.
In this Medical Center Hour, Professor Churchill will present his studies' findings as a prelude to disscussion of the implications for medical ethics and medical education and for establishing truly "patient-centered" practices.
The design of sustainable, just, and economically feasible environments for human health and well-being is one of the most urgent needs of the 21st century on a global scale. Aging populations, environmental pollution, rapid urbanization, increased poverty, rising health care costs, the need for preventive medicine, and new developments in social and medical science have created a host of design challenges and opportunities. In this Medical Center Hour, Tim Beatley and Reuben Rainey, co-directors of the UVA School of Architecture's new Center for Design and Health, explore ways designers and planners are meeting these challenges at a variety of scales, ranging from patient-centered health care facilities to healthy neighborhoods and cities.
When documentary filmmaker Kathy Leichter moved back into her childhood home after her mother's suicide, she discovered a hidden box of audiotapes. Sixteen years passed before she had the courage to delve into this trove, but there she unearthed what her mother had recorded about every aspect of her life--from the joys and challenges of her marriage to a state senator to her son's estrangement , as well as the highs and lows of living with bipolar disorder. Here one day is Ms. Leichter's emotionally candid film about a woman coping with mental illness, her family relationships, and the ripple effects of her suicide on those she loved. In this Medical center hour, Ms. Leichter offers her extraordinary award-winning film, speaks about the transformative nature of story, and shows how Here one day is helping to dissolve mental health stigma and to educate and support persons and families in communities and educational institutions across the country.
We live in times when empathy—the ability to imagine how it feels to be inside the skin of another—seems to be in short supply. As a writer of poetry and memoir, Mark Doty believes that literature is one of the most powerful tools we have to come close to the subjectivity of another person. The practice of medicine, too, is a work of knowing—of learning who someone is, what they need, and how they might be healed. In this Medical Center Hour, Mr. Doty explores these ideas through writings that grew out of the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic in this country and in recent work concerned with love, time, and citizenship in the human community.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Creative Writing Program, Department of English
Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (POST) is an initiative gaining acceptance across the country as a way for patients and families to ensure that care at the end of life is not only consistent with a patient's preferences, as expressed in a treating physician's orders, but also is consistent throughout the health care system, including across institutional boundaries. A completed POST form is an instrument that travels with the patient from one health care setting to another, as, for instance, from a nursing home to a hospital, and should be honored in all venues. Unlike traditional advance directives, POST is a physician's order, and is to be followed as such. Implementing POST is a process being handled state by state, with Oregon in the lead. In Virginia, pilot studies are underway in different regions of the Commonwealth and different hospital systems, with different forms and protocols. What's happening with POST in Central Virginia and at UVA? Are all of us-patients, physicians and other clinicians, and administrators alike-ready for POST?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the UVA Medical Center's Office of Patient/Family Education and Communication and the Compassionate Care Initiative, School of Nursing
What would it mean to name pain not as alien to human existence but as one of the defining conditions of being human? In this presentation, three experts--in disability studies, bioethics, and the cultural study of pain and pain medicine--consider our complicated attitudes toward pain, especially as we regard it in others.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Does some aspect of our personality survive bodily death? Long a philosophical and theological question, in the 20th century this became the subject of scientific research. Fifty years ago, in 1967, Ian Stevenson, then chair of UVA's Department of Psychiatry, created a research unit—now named the Division of Perceptual Studies—to study what, if anything, of the human personality survives after death. Dr. Stevenson's own research investigated hundreds of accounts of young children who claimed to recall past lives.
In this Medical Center Hour, faculty from the Division of Perceptual Studies highlight the unit's work since its founding, including studies of purported past lives, near-death experiences, and mind-brain interactions in phenomena such as deep meditation, veridical out-of-body experiences, deathbed visions, apparent communication from deceased persons, altered states of consciousness, and terminal lucidity in persons with irreversible brain damage. As the division enters its second half-century, what are its research priorities and partnerships?
History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, UVA
In summer 2013, UVA landscape architecture graduate students Harriett Jameson and Asa Eslocker travelled to Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California, three landscapes with the highest life expectancy in the world, to explore these places' physical, spatial, and material qualities-topography, plant communitites,urban form-and also the personal attachments that seniors in these sites have to their cultural landscapes. The people in these locales have long been studied for their genetics, diets, and recreation habits. But until Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker arrived, no one had inquired into or demonstrated in these settings the critical role of place in healthy longevity. Through study of these distinctive landscapes and the personal stories of elderly residents, the pair arrived at insights that may help communities rethink and redesign public landscapes to cultivate a culture of health and well being that spans infancy through old age.
In this Medical center hour, Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker focus on how place contributes to healthy aging and preview parts of their full-length documentary film, Landscapes of longevity, which will premiere in Charlottesville in November.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Center for Design + Health, School of Architecture, UVA
Fifty years ago President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned a Great Society, an America free from poverty and racial injustice and full of equality of opportunity and social mobility for all. Many legislative planks of his Great society platform--civil and voting rights, educational opportunity, fair housing practices, urban planning, mass transit, and health care --represent what we today consider "social determinants of health." This Medical center hour with bioethicist Erika Blacksher reviews how Americans are faring today in relation to key aspirations of LBJ's Great Society, especially those that bear on health. Americans generally live shorter, less healthy lives than their counterparts in peer nations, and within the U.S. health varies dramatically among social and economic groups and from region to region. What ethical concerns are raised by significant health disparities? Are such disparities unjust, as many in public health assume? If so, what are our responsibilites, and what ethical limits might constrain our pursuit of a more equitable distribution of health?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series and the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life