Personal Statement
I am a geriatric psychiatrist and health services researcher. My research focuses on ways of improving mental health and well-being among older adults, especially those with dementia and their caregivers.
Scholarly Expertise: Depression
Isaac Rhew
Personal Statement
I am a psychiatric epidemiologist with interests in the etiology and prevention of substance use, internalizing mental health problems, and their co-occurrence. My research explores these phenomena across multiple levels of influence–from within-individual factors that can vary over time to broader neighborhood- and other area-level contextual factors. I am also interested in the application of innovative epidemiologic and statistical methods.Patrick Sylvers
Personal Statement
Dr. Sylvers serves as the Director of Psychology Training at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System, American Lake Division. His primary research interests include personality and its relation to treatment outcomes, treatment outcomes related to trauma and anxiety related disorders, and the etiology and treatment of aggressive behavior. Dr. Sylvers also serves as a consultant for the Department of Veterans Affairs Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Depression training initiative.
Mark Sullivan
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).
Brian Poeschla
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.
Peter Vitaliano
Personal Statement
Over the last 25 years, my work has focused on relationships between stress and health in several risk groups (spouse caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease, medical students, psychiatric/medical outpatients/inpatients, air traffic controllers, and camp counselors). We have developed and/or revised measures of medical student stress, caregiver burden, patient anger/dyscontrol, process coping, appraisal, neuropsychological function and physician awareness of patient problems. These measures have been used by university researchers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies in clinical trials, prisons, nursing homes/long term care, rehabilitation facilities, and public health organizations. These psychosocial and behavioral measures have been shown to predict and be predicted by physiological and cognitive measures. We have also focused on moderators of such relationships, such as gender, personality, and co-morbidities. We have used primarily multicohort long-term studies that allow for interactions between exposures to stressors, hard-wired vulnerabilities, and more temporal resources. We attempted to identify mechanisms that can be potentially altered to have long-term public health significance in persons under chronic stress. I have also attempted to isolate groups that are at high risk for negative outcomes. In a perfect world, interventions should be used to help all persons who have deleterious responses to stress, but society cannot afford this. For this reason, the identification of high risk groups is imperative for maximizing the effect of interventions.
My research program’s long range goal is to better understand the mechanisms by which chronic stress translates into physical, mental, or cognitive health problems. We are examining caregivers of spouses with AD and demographically-similar spouse non-caregivers across time and assessing the degree to which elevated depression, stress hormones, inflammation, and insulin resistance in caregivers predict cognitive decline in caregivers relative to non-caregivers. We are also attempting to replicate our earlier work that showed that chronic stress and chronic disease moderate each other’s physiological risks. For example, physiological dysregulation that is specific to a disease (e.g., metabolic syndrome with CHD, blood pressure reactivity with hypertension, and immune function with cancer history, HbA1c with diabetes) is exacerbated in caregivers with a chronic disease relative to non-caregivers with a chronic disease, but no such differences occur in caregivers versus non-caregivers without a chronic disease. Finally, we are examining a large cohort of older adults sampled from various U.S. communities in order to assess the influence of life stressors on long term cognitive function and potential mediators of such changes.
Richard C. Veith
Personal Statement
| I am a Seattle native who has spent my entire academic career at the University of Washington School of Medicine. I joined the faculty of the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in 1977 and was based at the Seattle VA Puget Sound Health Care System. I joined the Seattle-American Lake Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) in 1977 as a clinical investigator and later served as GRECC Director from 1987-1998. In 1998, I was appointed Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and held this position until February, 2014. I am certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology with Added Qualifications in Geriatric Psychiatry and am listed in America’s Top Doctors and Best Doctors in America. I am recipient of the 2005 American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Robert Cancro Academic Leadership Award: Best Chair. I have conducted extensive research on the treatment of depression in patients with heart disease and stroke and has published more than 140 scientific publications. I am active in community efforts to improve the quality of care for the seriously mentally ill and with my faculty colleagues am implementing regionally, nationally, and internationally innovative and highly effective models of care that integrate mental health care into primary care settings. I am working with medical schools and the health ministries in Vietnam and Cambodia to strengthen psychiatric education, expand the mental health workforce, and develop delivery systems for psychiatric care in those countries. |
Paul Phillips
Personal Statement
My lab’s focus is reward processing, how it differs under behavior phenotypes that are more vulnerable or resilient to mental illness and how it is changed by psychiatric pathology. Our primary focus is dopamine transmission and the circuits in which is participates.
We developed tools that allow us to track dopamine with sub-second resolution in animals over the course of months (Clark et al, Nat Methods, 2010). This approach allows us to study trajectories of precise neurochemical encoding of behaviors over the course of the development of symptomology and subsequent treatment in animal models of disease. We also have adapted this technology for intraoperative recording in humans (Kishida et al, PLoS One, 2011).
Our research highlights include contributions in the area of dopamine’s role in learning (Flagel et al, Nature, 2012), decision making (Gan et al, Nat Neurosci, 2010) and goal navigation (Howe et al, Nature, 2013). We have gleaned information on how stress impacts appetitive motivation (Wanat et al, Nat Neurosci, 2013), how adolescent alcohol use produces enhanced risk taking later in life (Clark et al, PLoS One, 2012), and identified biological mechanisms for the motivational shift in stress-induced depressive disorders (Lemos et al, Nature, 2012) and the switch to excessive drug intake in substance abuse (Willuhn et al, Nat Neurosci, 2014).
These approaches have attracted a large number of collaborations, including National Academy members Akil, Palmiter, Graybiel and Kandel.
Brian Coleman
Personal Statement
I completed my Residency in Psychiatry with the UW in 1982 and since then have worked at Harborview Medical Center in the Psychiatry Department. I am a Clinical Associate Professor and provide weekend and on-call coverage for 5MB on the Intensive Psychiatric Unit.Eileen Twohy
I am a clinical psychologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital and UW Medicine, where my work primarily consists of clinical care and teaching. My two areas of focus are the provision of effective, trauma-informed treatment for youth and families in suicidal crises and the promotion of equitable access to behavioral healthcare.
