Personal Statement
Having always been interested in wholistic care, I completed a Med-Psych residency with board certification in both Internal Medicine and Psychiatry. My career has focused on integrating care to improve access to those who suffer from mental disorders. I have experience in developing, implementing, leading, and evaluating integrated Primary Care Mental Health programs. This work led to the development and national implementation of integrated care known in the VA as Primary Care Mental Health Integration (PCMHI).
At VA Puget Sound, I led a team that implemented and developed the first PCMHI program which has been rated as one of the top 10. It was through this integrated PCMHI work that I realized rural populations lacked access to mental health care and I became interested in how the emerging digital technologies could be leveraged to provide care. With the goal to improve mental health care for this population, I developed, implemented, and led the first Telemental Health Service at VA Puget Sound known as Promoting Access to Telemental Health (PATH). This program focused on implementing digital health into routine mental health care, evaluation of implementation efforts, and digital health curriculum design. PATH has been fully implemented into VA Puget Sound Mental Health Service Line.
As a researcher, I have served as a principal and co-investigator on numerous research projects that focused on the development and implementation PCMHI and Care Manager programs. More recently, my research has focused on evaluation and implementation of telemental health programs. Current work focuses on improving virtual integrated care in rural VA clinics, integrated care curricular design, evaluating mental health service delivery for the national VA Telehealth Clinical Resource Hubs, and supporting the UW Behavioral Health Institute to develop Digital Health Training programs. In addition, I am proud to serve as a Captain in the United States Navy Reserve and I am an Operation Iraqi Freedom Veteran.
Personal Statement
My area of expertise is addiction psychiatry.
Personal Statement
I completed my undergraduate, medical school, and residency training at the University of Washington in Seattle. I am board certified in family medicine and psychiatry with subspecialty training in addiction medicine. My clinical interests include inpatient and outpatient psychiatric consultation to primary care providers, mood disorders in pregnant and postpartum mothers, and clinical service in underserved communities.
Personal Statement
I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist with experience in delivering guideline-based care for child and adolescent psychiatric disorders. I am the Medical Director of the Outpatient Psychiatry Clinics at Seattle Children’s, and have experience with training of staff to deliver guideline-based care. I also have health services training, including having obtained a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Health Services and participation in a Primary Care-Psychiatry Research Fellowship funded by the National Institutes of Health.
My clinical work includes treatment of outpatients and inpatients with a variety of mental health needs, and I provide telepsychiatry in our outpatient clinics. I have experience with collaboration with primary care providers to deliver care to pediatric patients, including serving as a consulting psychiatrist on the Partnership Access Line, which provides psychiatric consultation regarding mental health assessment and treatment to pediatricians and other primary care physicians throughout the state of Washington. I have expertise in the treatment of common mental health problems in a pediatric population.
My research has focused on mental health care for common psychiatric illnesses including depression and ADHD, and has included utilization of collaborative models of care and testing of interventions for youth with psychiatric diagnoses. I have been a co-investigator, with R01 PI Kathleen Myers, MD, for a study of guideline-based care provided by telepsychiatry for youth in rural communities with a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Personal Statement
My research aims to improve the public health impact of evidence-based behavioral health interventions for addressing comorbidities common among ethnoculturally diverse and underserved victims of trauma, including PTSD, depression, suicidal ideation, and risky substance use. I study the integration of behavioral interventions into general medical settings, with an emphasis on provider-centered training methods to support the delivery of patient-centered interventions. My current interest is in harnessing technologic innovations in machine learning and artificial intelligence, along with user-centered design, to enhance suicide prevention training scalability and sustainability. https://darnell.psychiatry.uw.edu/
Personal Statement
My clinical interests are delirium, women’s mental health and behavioral heath integration in primary care settings.
I am a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and I work as the Deputy Associate Chief of Staff for Mental Health at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. I am a licensed clinical psychologist. My research is focused on studying mental health technologies to support Veterans, Service Members, their families, and the health care staff that treat them. I research mobile applications, virtual reality, virtual standardized patients, and other innovative approaches to improve mental health education and services. I have conducted DoD and VA funded research and focus on applied interventions that may have promise to make a difference in the lives of those we serve. I am an Army Veteran and current behavioral health officer in the Washington State Army National Guard.
Personal Statement
My research interests cover two main areas:
1) development and use of novel radioligands for positron emission tomography (PET) in CNS disorders
2) cannabinoid pharmacology, and cannabis use disorder and comorbid neuropsychiatric disorders
My VA Career Development Award (VA equivalent of an NIH K-award) focuses on the translational development of imaging neuroinflammation with PET following repetitive blast mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). In collaboration with David Cook’s lab, imaging neuroinflammation in a mouse model of repetitive mTBI provides an opportunity to compare imaging outcomes directly with histopathology in brain tissue, which is not possible in humans. In collaboration with Elaine Peskind, imaging neuroinflammation in Veterans with mTBI and persistent post-concussive symptoms provides neuroanatomical specificity to ongoing neuroinflammation, which to date has been informed using cerebrospinal fluid and serum biomarkers. To accomplish this, my laboratory evaluates and develops established and novel PET radioligands for biomarkers of neuroinflammation. Additionally, I am interested in developing novel radioligands for druggable targets for which there are no current, suitable radioligands available. I have several ongoing collaborations with other investigators at UW and VA in which I provide support with PET imaging.
As a clinician and researcher, I am interested in how patients use cannabis for perceived therapeutic effect, and the risks and adverse outcomes resulting from substantial or chronic cannabis use. These clinical patterns can now be placed into context with a better understanding of the endocannabinoid system (ECS), which provide opportunity for more selective and safer therapeutic drug development. Due in part to the recentness of discovery of the ECS, one of my goals is to educate clinical providers on the preclinical and evidenced based research conducted to date on cannabis use and the ECS so they are better informed when discussing cannabis use with patients, and better prepared for understanding mechanisms of anticipated ECS-based medications currently under development. A second goal is to conduct research on cannabis use disorder and comorbid conditions, and identification of therapies that might better address a patient’s desired outcome from cannabis use, thereby reducing the likelihood of its associated risks.
Personal Statement
My clinical service and research focuses on the interaction of mental and physical illness, especially in patients with chronic pain. Much of my research in recent decades has focused on the risks of treating chronic pain with opioids. I have developed educational programs and outcome tracking tools to assist with opioid treatment of chronic pain. I have published a book about patient empowerment in chronic disease care, The Patient as Agent of Health and Health Care (Oxford, 2017). I have another book written with Jane Ballantyne forthcoming, The Right to Pain Relief and other deep roots of the opioid epidemic (Oxford, 2022).
Personal Statement
My primary interests are in diagnostic evaluation, psychiatric methods, psychosomatic medicine, fatigue syndromes, pain disorders, abnormal illness behaviors, and human temperament and personality. I have conducted research jointly with colleagues at the University of Washington and the University of Washington Twin Registry on chronic widespread pain, depression and related phenomena.
