Read Vanessa Grubb's biography here.
Additional articles by Vanessa Grubbs beyond what are listed below may be found through this PubMed search.
Book by Vanessa Grubbs:
Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers by
A young, hopeful doctor's memoir--an unforgettable love story and an informative journey into the world of medicine and kidney transplantation that ultimately asks: What does it mean to let go of something that you love, even if it is life itself? When Vanessa fell in love with Robert, she had no idea that the relationship would thoroughly transform her life. Robert suffered from end-stage kidney disease, which required him to endure years of debilitating dialysis to stay alive, at least until his failed organ could be replaced by a kidney transplant. Although Vanessa was a primary care doctor, she developed a deeper understanding of the difficulties Robert faced with dialysis and in finding a donor. Despite their being early in their relationship, she volunteered one of her own kidneys--and discovered that she was a match. This life-affirming experience forged a bond that would become a pillar of Vanessa and Robert's marriage--and the beginning of her new career. Motivated by Robert's experience and her newfound knowledge, Vanessa became a nephrologist--a kidney doctor--and discovered far more about the realities of the specialty. Shaped by Vanessa's remarkable experiences as a doctor, a woman of color, a mother, and a kidney donor, Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers is a love story, an expos#65533;, and a clarion call for us all to consider the dualities of both loving and letting go.
Chapters 1-3: Click on "Read a Sample" to see the first three chapters of her book.
Chapter 4: Available only to UT faculty, staff and students.
Articles by Vanessa Grubbs:
James W Pennebaker is a professor in the UT Austin Department of Psychology. He is a Regents Centennial Professor and the Executive Director of Project 2021. Read his biography here.
Additional articles beyond what are listed below may be found here.
Books by James W. Pennebaker:
Emotion, Disclosure, and Health by
Prepared by psychological researchers in cognitive, physiological, clinical, social, personality, and health psychology as well as medicine and anthropology, the 15 essays in this volume examine such basic issues as how people respond to emotional upheavals, why they respond the way they do, and why translating emotional events into language increases physical and mental health.
Expressive Writing: Words that Heal: Using Expressive Writing to Overcome Traumas and Emotional Upheavals, Resolve Issues, Improve Health, and Build Resilience by
That's the advice James Pennebaker and John Evans offer in Expressive Writing: Words That Heal. This book will help you overcome the traumas and emotional upheavals that are keeping you awake. You'll resolve issues, improve your health, and build resilience. Based on nearly 30 years of scientific research, the book shows you how and when expressive writing can improve your health. Its clear explanations of the writing process will enable you to express your most serious issues and deal with them through writing. Book jacket.
Opening up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain by
Expressing painful emotions is hard--yet it can actually improve our mental and physical health. This lucid, compassionate book has introduced tens of thousands of readers to expressive writing, a simple yet powerful self-help technique grounded in scientific research. Leading experts James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth describe how taking just a few minutes to write about deeply felt personal experiences or problems may help you: *Heal old emotional wounds *Feel a greater sense of well-being *Decrease stress *Improve relationships *Boost your immune system Vivid stories and examples yield compelling insights into secrets, self-disclosure, and the hidden price of silence. The third edition incorporates findings from hundreds of recent studies and includes practical exercises to help you try expressive writing for yourself. It features extensive new information on specific health benefits, as well as when the approach may not be helpful.
Articles by James W. Pennebaker:
Annie Brewster is the Founder and Executive Director of Health Story Collaborative and Co-Director of Healing Story Sessions. She is also a staff physician at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Read her biography here.
Read the story of the Health Story Collaborative here.
Audio Stories are conversations between Health Story Collaborative team members and patients who are facing illnesses or health challenges. Listen to the Audio Stories here.
TEDx Talk by Annie Brewster:
Articles and Podcasts by and about Annie Brewster:
Jonathan Metzl is the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University.
Jonathan Metzl's website has links to additional articles and media appearances beyond what is listed below.
Read his biography here. More information about Dr. Metzl may be found here.
Books by Jonathan Metzl:
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease by
Revolution was in the air in the 1960s. Civil rights protests demanded attention on the airwaves and in the streets. Anger gave way to revolt, and revolt provided the elusive promise of actual change. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. Here, far from the national glare of sit-ins, boycotts, or riots, African American men suddenly appeared in the asylum’s previously white, locked wards. Some of these men came to the attention of the state after participating in civil rights demonstrations, while others were sent by the military, the penal system, or the police. Though many of the men hailed from Detroit, ambulances and paddy wagons brought men from other urban centers as well. Once at Ionia, psychiatrists classified these men under a single diagnosis: schizophrenia.InThe Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American men at the Ionia State Hospital, and how events at Ionia mirrored national conversations that increasingly linked blackness, madness, and civil rights. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents—from scientific literature, to music lyrics, to riveting, tragic hospital charts—Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the 1960s and 1970s in ways that directly reflected national political events. As he demonstrates, far from resulting from the racist intentions of individual doctors or the symptoms of specific patients, racialized schizophrenia grew from a much wider set of cultural shifts that defined the thoughts, actions, and even the politics of black men as being inherently insane.Ultimately,The Protest Psychosisprovides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions, even during our current, seemingly post-race era of genetics, pharmacokinetics, and brain scans.
Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs by
Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the story goes. In Prozac on the Couch, psychiatrist Jonathan Michel Metzl boldly challenges recent psychiatric history, showing that there's a lot of Dr. Freud encapsulated in late-twentieth-century psychotropic medications. Providing a cultural history of treatments for depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses through a look at the professional and popular reception of three "wonder drugs"--Miltown, Valium, and Prozac--Metzl explains the surprising ways Freudian gender categories and popular gender roles have shaped understandings of these drugs. Prozac on the Couch traces the notion of "pills for everyday worries" from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, through psychiatric and medical journals, popular magazine articles, pharmaceutical advertisements, and popular autobiographical "Prozac narratives." Metzl shows how clinical and popular talk about these medications often reproduces all the cultural and social baggage associated with psychoanalytic paradigms--whether in a 1956 Cosmopolitan article about research into tranquilizers to "cure" frigid women; a 1970s American Journal of Psychiatry ad introducing Jan, a lesbian who "needs" Valium to find a man; or Peter Kramer's description of how his patient "Mrs. Prozac" meets her husband after beginning treatment. Prozac on the Couch locates the origins of psychiatry's "biological revolution" not in the Valiumania of the 1970s but in American popular culture of the 1950s. It was in the 1950s, Metzl points out, that traditional psychoanalysis had the most sway over the American imagination. As the number of Miltown prescriptions soared (reaching 35 million, or nearly one per second, in 1957), advertisements featuring uncertain brides and unfaithful wives miraculously cured by the "new" psychiatric medicines filled popular magazines. Metzl writes without nostalgia for the bygone days of Freudian psychoanalysis and without contempt for psychotropic drugs, which he himself regularly prescribes to his patients. What he urges is an increased self-awareness within the psychiatric community of the ways that Freudian ideas about gender are entangled in Prozac and each new generation of wonder drugs. He encourages, too, an understanding of how ideas about psychotropic medications have suffused popular culture and profoundly altered the relationship between doctors and patients.
Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality by
You see someone smoking a cigarette and say, "Smoking is bad for your health," when what you mean is, "You are a bad person because you smoke." You encounter someone whose body size you deem excessive, and say, "Obesity is bad for your health," when what you mean is, "You are lazy, unsightly, or weak of will." You see a woman bottle-feeding an infant and say, "Breastfeeding is better for that child's health," when what you mean is that the woman must be a bad parent. You see the smokers, the overeaters, the bottle-feeders, and affirm your own health in the process. In these and countless other instances, the perception of your own health depends in part on your value judgments about others, and appealing to health allows for a set of moral assumptions to fly stealthily under the radar. Against Health argues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good. And, that disparities in the incidence and prevalence of disease are closely linked to disparities in income and social support. To be clear, the book's stand against health is not a stand against the authenticity of people's attempts to ward off suffering. Against Health instead claims that individual strivings for health are, in some instances, rendered more difficult by the ways in which health is culturally configured and socially sustained. The book intervenes into current political debates about health in two ways. First, Against Health compellingly unpacks the divergent cultural meanings of health and explores the ideologies involved in its construction. Second, the authors present strategies for moving forward. They ask, what new possibilities and alliances arise? What new forms of activism or coalition can we create? What are our prospects for well-being? In short, what have we got if we ain't got health? Against Health ultimately argues that the conversations doctors, patients, politicians, activists, consumers, and policymakers have about health are enriched by recognizing that, when talking about health, they are not all talking about the same thing. And, that articulating the disparate valences of "health" can lead to deeper, more productive, and indeed more healthy interactions about our bodies.
Articles by Jonathan Metzl:
John Metzl's Media Appearances:
Additional media appearances on MSNBC may be found through a search for Metzl on the MSNBC website: http://www.msnbc.com/search/metzl
Bitter Roots by
For over a century, plant specialists worldwide have sought to transform healing plants in African countries into pharmaceuticals. And for equally as long, conflicts over these medicinal plants have endured, from stolen recipes and toxic tonics to unfulfilled promises of laboratory equipment and usurped personal patents. In Bitter Roots, Abena Dove Osseo-Asare draws on publicly available records and extensive interviews with scientists and healers in Ghana, Madagascar, and South Africa to interpret how African scientists and healers, rural communities, and drug companies--including Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Unilever--have sought since the 1880s to develop drugs from Africa's medicinal plants. Osseo-Asare recalls the efforts to transform six plants into pharmaceuticals: rosy periwinkle, Asiatic pennywort, grains of paradise, Strophanthus, Cryptolepis, and Hoodia. Through the stories of each plant, she shows that herbal medicine and pharmaceutical chemistry have simultaneous and overlapping histories that cross geographic boundaries. At the same time, Osseo-Asare sheds new light on how various interests have tried to manage the rights to these healing plants and probes the challenges associated with assigning ownership to plants and their biochemical components. A fascinating examination of the history of medicine in colonial and postcolonial Africa, Bitter Roots will be indispensable for scholars of Africa; historians interested in medicine, biochemistry, and society; and policy makers concerned with drug access and patent rights.
The Creativity Cure by
A Do-It-Yourself Prescription for Happiness In their insightful book, wife-and-husband physicians Carrie and Alton Barron present an innovative, highly achievable five-part plan to unleash happiness and alleviate depression and anxiety by tapping into creative potential. A gifted psychiatrist and a premier hand surgeon, Carrie and Alton Barron draw upon the latest psychological research, a combined forty years of medical practice, and personal experience to demonstrate how creative action is integral to long-term happiness and well-being. The Five-Part Prescription for the Creativity Cure--Insight, Movement, Mind Rest, Your Own Two Hands, and Mind Shift--leads the way to a more meaningful, fulfilling life by simultaneously developing self-understanding and self-expression. With the Barrons' detailed tools and strategies for cultivating creative outlets, overcoming unconscious fears and barriers to happiness, and linking internal thought to external action, readers will build the mind-set and habits necessary for happiness and positive change. They will experience--and learn how to sustain--the deep satisfaction that accompanies creating something by hand. The perfect self-help book for our handmade, homemade, crafting culture, The Creativity Cure has a simple yet profoundly inspirational message: that you can find the authentic, contented life you crave by taking happiness into your own two hands.
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