PsychEd Book Club 2: Healing with Dr. Thomas Insel

Welcome to PsychEd, the psychiatry podcast for medical learners, by medical learners. This is our second book club episode centered around the novel Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health by Thomas Insel, MD.

This book is a part memoir / part manifesto written by one of our generation’s most important leaders in neuroscience and psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Insel. Dr. Insel served as the director of the NIMH for 13 years from 2002-2015. Healing is replete with his reflections on personal and clinical experiences as well as epidemiological data, research, and policies related to mental health. Dr. Insel argues that medicine’s failure to significantly reduce the mortality and morbidity of psychiatric illnesses is less due to a lack of scientific progress, and more a result of poor implementation of existing interventions that are already well supported by the evidence.

Guest: Dr. Thomas Insel

Hosts: Dr. Gaurav Sharma - Staff psychiatrist working in Nunavut, Canada

Dr. Kate Braithwaite - Family doctor from South Africa

Ahmad Khan - MS4 at Western University

Dr. Sophie Gregoire-Mitha - PGY1 Psychiatry resident in Manitoba

Audio editing: Dr. Gaurav Sharma

Episode Evaluation: Dr. Angad Singh

Our discussion is divided into 3 main sections:

(2:48): Main themes from the book

(15:58): Clinical application of strategies discussed in the book

(41:30): Reflections on the book in the current Psychiatric landscape

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