Please join UCLA’s Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors for an Open Mind with Jessi Gold, MD, author of How Do You Feel- One Doctor's Search for Humanity in Medicine and Helen Hansen, MD, PhD, psychiatrist-anthropologist, Interim Director of the Semel Institute will join Dr. Gold in discussion.

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How Do You Feel is a poignant and thought-provoking memoir following one psychiatrist and four of her patients as they deal with the unspoken mental and physical costs of caring for others. 

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Expertly weaving research with unforgettable stories and raw emotion, How Do You Feel? demonstrates the unbridled capacity that we as humans have for connecting, learning, and growing. At once deeply personal, but also utterly universal, it reminds us that when caring for others, we first must remember to care for ourselves.

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Jessi Gold, MD was used to being constantly busy.  She was an assistant professor, practicing psychiatrist, university wellness leader, regular media expert, and dedicated friend and family member.  She was a doctor, trained to serve, to put the needs of others before her own.  But when she became so mentally overwhelmed that she committed an unthinkable error during a patient session, Jessi was forced to reevaluate everything that the medical system had taught her and reassess her own complex relationship to the health-care industry. 

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Jessi began to examine the healthcare systems through the eyes of some of her healthcare worker patients—a thirty-something resident with OCD, a pregnant nurse suffering from PTSD, an aspiring medical student with crippling test anxiety, and an experienced ER physician who feels completely overwhelmed. In their discussions of burnout, perfectionism, empathy, and the emotional burden of working in health care, and through her own personal therapy sessions, Jessi recognizes that she is not alone in struggling to maintain her humanity, in a field that she chose because of its humanity in the first place.

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Expertly weaving research with unforgettable stories and raw emotion, How Do You Feel? demonstrates the unbridled capacity that we as humans have for connecting, learning, and growing. At once deeply personal, but also utterly universal, it reminds us all that when caring for others, we first have to remember to care for ourselves.

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How Do You Feel? officially launches on October 8th. To purchase an advance signed copy,  click HERE or you can pre-order the book from your favorite bookseller.

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BIOS:

Jessi Gold, MD, MS is the Chief Wellness Officer of the University of Tennessee System and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. This major leadership position encompasses 5 campuses across the state of Tennessee and includes over 59,000 students and 19,000 faculty and staff. She works clinically as an outpatient psychiatrist at student health, is a regular expert in the media on mental health and is a social media influencer.  She has been featured in, among others, The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, PBS NewsHour, The Washington Post, and SELF. Dr. Gold is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. and M.S in Anthropology, the Yale School of Medicine, and Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, where she served as chief resident.

 

Helena Hansen, MD, PhD psychiatrist-anthropologist, Professor and Interim Chair of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, and Interim Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. She is an international leader in the field of social medicine, and of the integration of rigorous social science into academic medicine as well as into research on social determinants of health and health equity.  Dr. Hansen popularized the term "translational Social Science" by launching UCLA medical school's research theme in Health Equity and Translational Social Science as its inaugural chair  rom 2020-2023,  She is the author of three books: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America; Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to treating the Social Determinant of Health; and Addiction to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal  Drug Ministries. She is the author of over 100 articles and chapters in leading clinical and social science journals, serves or has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Psychiatry; American Anthropologist among others and serves on the governing boards of the International Society for Addiction Medicine, the Lanet Commission on US Health Policy, the National Academy of Medicine Opioid Action Collaborative and the Drug Policy Alliance among others and has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and election to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.