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
I am interested in methods of evidence translation and knowledge exchange that improve system and policymaking in behavioral health with a focal interest in public mental health for children and juvenile justice system reform.
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.
Personal Statement
My career goal is to give suicidal clients and their clinicians the best chance to succeed. I have been working in the area of health services, treatment development, and clinical trials research to prevent suicide for over 20 years. My graduate training was in community/clinical psychology and focused on achieving clinical ends through prevention and other systemic interventions in socio-culturally diverse populations. I have brought these perspectives into health services research. I have developed or adapted interventions to improve care and clinician willingness to work with suicidal patients including Caring Contacts, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS), and Preventing Addiction Related Suicide (PARS). I have developed an adaptation of DBT, Accepting the Challenges of Employment and Self-Sufficiency (DBT-ACES), a program to assist psychiatrically disabled individuals find and maintain living wage employment. My research has been funded by NIMH, NIDA, the Department of Defense, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Department of Veteran Health Affairs, and the State of Washington.
I am the director of the Center for Suicide Prevention and Recovery (CSPAR) whose mission is to promote the recovery of suicidal individuals and the effectiveness and well-being the clinicians and families who care for them by conducting rigorous and ecologically valid research, developing innovative interventions, improving policies, systems and environments of care, and providing expert training and consultation. CSPAR faculty and staff seek a deep understanding of the cultures and settings in which we work that leads to meaningful and effective interventions ready for implementation.
In addition to clinical research, I founded the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration (SIRC) and am the PI and Director of the Military Suicide Research Consortium Dissemination and Implementation core. These organizations focus on disseminating and implementing innovative, evidence-based interventions in the systems that need them. Beyond my research, I directed the Harborview Dialectical Behavior Therapy program at Harborview Medical Center 1996-2019, co-lead the UW DBT Training Program and have a long history of training and mentoring junior faculty, fellows, psychiatry residents, pre-doctoral psychology interns, undergraduate students, and post-baccalaureate trainees. I provide psychotherapy and consultation at the UWMC Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic.
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.
Personal Statement
My areas of expertise are perinatal psychiatry, psychotherapy and collaborative care.
Personal Statement
I am clinical psychologist and a Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, and a clinical researcher specializing in ADHD throughout the lifespan. I direct the PEARL Clinic (Program to enhance attention, regulation, and learning) at Seattle Children’s. The PEARL Clinic is based on a multidisciplinary and collaborative care model which works closely with PCP’s who refer families to PEARL for evaluation and access to our behavioral group treatment programs and treatment recommendations. The PEARL clinic also provided multidisciplinary training for psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, family medicine physicians, and medical students. The majority of my clinical work involves diagnostic evaluations and consultations for the parents, referring physician, and schools.
My research emphasis is on personalizing ADHD treatment, and determining how best to combine and sequence interventions throughout the lifespan for individuals with ADHD. I have assisted in the development of several stimulant and non stimulant medications, and participated in many clinical trials. Currently, we are conducting a study for parents with ADHD who have young children with ADHD symptoms where we are treating the parent with medication and behavioral parent training or behavior parent training. I am also investigating the relationship between genetic factors and ADHD treatment response.
Other areas of interest include sleep problems and overlap with ADHD, and novel treatments such as Trigeminal Nerve Stimulation (TNS) and augmentation strategies such as mindfulness and physical exercise or activity level.
Personal Statement
I am a board-certified Consult-Liaison psychiatrist at UW Medical Center – Montlake and the General Internal Medicine Clinic, as well as a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
When working with patients, my goal is to understand their life history and personalities in addition to their medical and psychiatric conditions. I am also involved in teaching UW medical students as well as practicing mental health providers across the state.
I earned my M.D. from the University of Florida, Gainesville, then completed residency at the University of Michigan and a fellowship at Northwestern University. My interests include treatment of psychiatric conditions in medically ill patients, collaborative care, quality improvement, delirium, and medical education.
Personal Statement
I am a psychologist who carries out research, provides community education to a broad range of audiences, trains postgraduate students, works on public policy– and has served as a clinician with children and families for many years. My main interests are fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), early childhood mental health, and interventions for children born prenatally exposed to alcohol and other drugs and their families. My research is currently based at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, but I also work in collaboration with UW researchers– and scientists at the University of Rochester in New York and multiple other academic institutions. A main research focus has been the Families Moving Forward (FMF) Program, a family-focused FASD intervention, now being disseminated primarily in the USA and Canada. The FMF Program is also now being translated into a mobile health application, called FMF Connect, for even broader use. Through Seattle Children’s, I co-direct a pilot service focused on assessment and short-term consultation for youth with prenatal substance exposure (including alcohol), and their families. I also offer mental health services to a broad range of young children and develops research focused on early childhood mental health.
Over the years, beyond research and clinical work, I have been able to work toward change in national US public policy, collaborate with Indigenous communities and researchers in remote Northwestern Australia, and train dedicated young professionals in psychology and psychiatry. I am grateful for these remarkable career opportunities… and the chance to meet so many resilient and inspiring families.
Note that you can only reach me through my Seattle Children’s email, at: heather.carmichaelolson@seattlechildrens.org
