Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent ‘Farah’ (Hassiba Freiha, Kenton Oxley, Lebanon, 2022), released in Lebanese cinemas on 24th November 2022, Winner of Jury Award at Chelsea Film Festival, New York A recent systematic review postulated that the serotonin theory as an underlying biochemical basis for depression is not substantiated by robust […]
Latest articles
How Condors Die
Film Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York ‘Utama’ (Directed by Alejandro Loayza Grisi, produced by Alma Films/La Mayor Cine, Bolivia, 2022), Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival, in general release in UK cinemas on 25th November 2022 Utama (“our home” in the Quechua language), written and directed by […]
Finding the Right Words, a book on Grief, Dementia, and Literature
Podcast with Cindy Weinstein In this episode, we get to speak with Cindy Weinstein, co-author of FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS, a memoir about losing a parent after a ten-year struggle with dementia. Weinstein is the Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of American Literature at the California Institute of Technology, where she has taught and written […]
The Story of the Wound that Cries Out: Using Narrative to Inform Healthcare Design in Research and Practice
Blog by Kari Nixon “Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” –Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience […]
Always Looking
Chloé Cooper Jones. Easy Beauty: A Memoir. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2022. ISBN 9781982151997. Book Review by Samuel Freeman A baby is born “a ball of twisted muscle and tucked bone […] bent in half” with an unexpected medical condition that turns out to be sacral agenesis, a congenital absence of the […]
Music and Healing
Book Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Weill-Cornell Medicine, New York The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers, published by White Rabbit, London, UK, 2022 In recent years a fascinating neurobiological literature has emerged, describing the connections between music and one’s earliest memories and emotions.[1] Clinical applications have also been developed: Patients with advanced dementia […]
September 2022 Issue
Casualties of the World War II metaphor: women’s reproductive health fighting for narrative inclusion in COVID-19 Yuki Bailey, Megha Shankar, Patrick Phillips It’s about time: on the need of a temporal language for ecologically dimensioned medical humanities and public health scholarship Julia Zielke Psychedelic injustice: should bioethics tune in to the voices of psychedelic-using communities? […]
September 2019 Issue
Essential(ist) medicine: promoting social explanations for racial variation in biomedical research [read the article summary] Iliya Gutin Extraordinary minds, impossible choices: mental health, special skills and television Rebecca C Beirne How The Fault in Our Stars illuminates four themes of the Adolescent End of Life Narrative [read the article summary] Anna Obergfell Kirkman, Jane A […]
Bridge Work: The Behavioural and Social Sciences in Dentistry
Blog by Patricia Neville As a social scientist working in oral health research and dental education, I am regularly frustrated about how closed dentistry is to the behavioural and social sciences. Working as a sociologist in oral health research can be a lonely place. I am treated as an “exotic animal” with “curious” tools and […]
Abuse of Trust: A Psychiatrist Eroding Professional Boundaries
Film Review by Khalid Ali, Film and Media Correspondent ‘The Shrink Next Door’ (TV miniseries directed by Michael Showalter and Jesse Peretz, USA, 2021, available on Apple TV). Caution: this review contains plot spoilers Psychiatrist-patient stories have been a prominent theme in American cinema; ‘Analyze This’ (Harold Ramis, USA, 1999), ‘Side Effects’ (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2013), and ‘To the Bone’ (Marti […]