PsychMinded July Announcements

[Vivian Wang]

Hi, PsychMinded! Hope everyone is staying safe and having a great summer break! We have a few exciting announcements to share:

1. We have a new Facebook group! We will be using this in lieu of the public Facebook page moving forward. You can join it here to stay updated on upcoming events and announcements. Open to all students!
2. BCM Book Discussion: Black Man in a White Coat via Zoom on Sunday, July 12 at 12pm. 
• Looking for a good book to dive into? Join Physicians for Human Rights and PsychMinded for a discussion of Dr. Damon Tweedy’s passionate and profound memoir- Black Man in a White Coat! The meeting will be held over Zoom with Dr. Andrea Stolar, Dr. Sophia Banu, and Dr. Karla Fredericks.
• Brief book description: The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career.
• If you’re interested, please sign-up here.
3. The Texas Mental Health Equity Mentor Network
• Calling all those interested in the wonderful world of mental health and psychiatry! The Texas Mental Health Equity Mentor Network welcomes you to apply for our faculty mentorship program. The goal of this program is to connect students with experienced faculty involved in mental health and psychiatry as a career. This is a great opportunity to learn more about mental health and psychiatry and how to apply it throughout your training and career! For more details, please fill out this application (all students welcome and accepted – application is more for the purpose of matching with a mentor): 
4. PsychMinded is proud to present our very own Mental Health Interview Series! 
• PsychMinded has been conducting interviews with psychiatry and psychology faculty members with a variety of perspectives. The series is set to launch near the end of the July in conjunction with BCM Progress Notes- stay tuned! 
• If you are interested in potentially conducting an interview or know someone in psych who might be interested in being interviewed (i.e. BCM resident, psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, etc.), please reach out to Jessica Sheu. This would be a great way to network/get to know the faculty!
5. Research Opportunity
• Dr. David Mathai, a rising PGY4 BCM resident, has an idea for a research project to explore factors implicated in mental health emergencies at Ben Taub, including race, diagnosis, prior history of violence, etc. This would be to see if there are evident differences in response and outcome due to race. He is looking for a student to be in the driver seat for this project. That role would include literature review, IRB write-up, data collection/analysis, and primary authorship. Ideally, this would be someone with: Psych clerkship familiarity, active Epic access, reasonable time to commit to this project and some prior research experience, although he would encourage anyone to reach out if interested! If interested, please contact him at dma...@bcm.edu. 
6. Finally, July is Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month! 
• This month highlights the following three important aims: to improve access to mental health treatment and service, to address the need for improved access to care, treatment, and services for those diagnosed with severe and persistent mental health disorder and to enhance public awareness of mental illness and mental illness among minorities. 
• In honor of this month, the APA is doing a month-long series featuring educational resources on mental health of diverse groups on Instagram. Follow them here. PsychMinded will also be doing weekly posts highlighting these resources on our new Facebook page, so join (link above) if you haven’t yet! 

As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions/concerns/feedback! 

Have a great weekend,

Vivian and Louisa

BCM PsychMinded|Public Relations Officers, 2020-2021