Welcome to you all, and thank you for your commitment to better mental health.

A patient with a mood disorder recently sent an email conveying her thanks to psychologist Neda Gould and psychiatrist Karen Swartz:

“I wanted to express to them both my eternal gratitude. … They make me feel like their only patient. I owe them my life. And, thanks to them, I know it’s a life worth living.”

Compassionate and dedicated clinicians can make an enormous difference in people’s lives — especially if they employ a constructive framework for making sense of what is troubling the patients and how best to intervene. Our Perspectives framework emphasizes not only knowing the psychiatric illness, but also knowing the person very well.

I gave Grand Rounds this fall on how our four-faceted framework can improve on the prevailing one, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This year, for the first time, all of our Grand Rounds, in 30-minute lecture formats with 10 minutes of questions and answers at the end, are available on our YouTube channel. There’s a recent one by Dr. Swartz on whether social media is harmful to mental health.

Dr. Gould has also shared her expertise on YouTube with a video, viewed more than 700,000 times, that focuses on reducing stress through deep breathing. She will soon have a page on our department’s website, providing a variety of tools for those seeking stress relief. Dr. Gould teaches the value of meditation, a technique that was practiced by another of our psychologists, Dr. Roland Griffiths, founder of our Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Dr. Griffiths passed away this fall at age 77. Among his last interviews was one recorded with Oprah Winfrey.

Dr. Roland’s successor is Dr. Fred Barrett, an expert on the brain mechanisms underlying psychedelic treatment. He is busy with plans to extend the center’s exciting work, include establishing a clinic that will open concurrently with the likely Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA (also known as Ecstasy) in early 2025 to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Approval of psilocybin to treat major depressive disorder could follow not long after.

To see the YouTube videos of Gould, Potash, Swartz and Griffiths, visit this link: hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/about/news/brainwise-videos.