News

Jodie Neukirch Elliott, who was born with a heart condition, was passionate about helping adolescents and young adults with chronic medical conditions; nowhere was this more evident than in her tireless work to create magical virtual Children's Prom experiences during the pandemic. She passed away on August 3, 2022, from complications related to a heart transplant. In honor of her creativity and dedication to making the annual event as special as possible for participants, the Duke Children’s Prom will be renamed “Jodie’s Prom.”

Duke Health is among the health systems across the state that are using the NCCARE360 platform to better serve their patients. Susan Spratt, MD, associate professor of medicine, is leading the implementation at Duke, and Elena Tenenbaum, PhD, assistant professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences, is spearheading the behavioral health facets of Duke’s efforts.

If your alertness and reaction time is see-sawing more than usual, you may be more at risk of a viral illness. That’s the key finding of an experiment led by University of Michigan researchers working in close collaboration with researchers at the Duke University School of Medicine—including Duke Psychiatry's P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP—and the University of Virginia.

In this opinion piece published in Modern Healthcare, Kathryn Dickerson, PhD, and Kafui Dzirasa, MD, PhD, of Duke Psychiatry and Tracie Locklear, PhD, of North Carolina Central University, explain how companies and universities can partner to bring more people of color into careers in medical research.

For second-year child and adolescent psychiatry fellow Aishwarya Rajagopalan, DO, MHS, the fellowship’s school consultation rotation is a golden opportunity “to engage with a system that plays a really big role in the outcome of the care we deliver and to see what happens ‘on the other side,’ outside of our clinic,” which she says can sometimes feel like a vacuum.

Cameron Strong’s advice to prospective and current trainees, regardless of their specialty, is to keep an open mind. He believes taking advantage of a variety of opportunities, even if they don’t seem directly related to their future plans, can help trainees grow as people and as clinicians. It’s an approach he takes to heart, and if he hadn’t followed his own counsel, today he’d be performing endoscopies instead of psychiatric evaluations.

In 2017, using state grant funds, the Duke Sickle Cell Center began contracting with Duke Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences to embed behavioral health care within the center. Under the contract, every patient who visits the clinic is offered free behavioral health services, regardless of their income level, insurance coverage, or network limits.

Latinx children are disproportionately impacted by mental health care inequities, including for ADHD. To help address this issue locally, a team of ADHD researchers and clinicians from Duke Psychiatry is partnering with staff from El Futuro—a non-profit outpatient clinic that provides comprehensive mental health services for Latinx families—to develop a culturally-adapted approach that enhances existing ADHD treatment for Latinx families in the Durham community. 

Ensuring equity in research is a critical step in advancing health equity. In this perspective published in the journal "Health Equity," the authors—including Duke Psychiatry's Dane Whicker, PhD, and colleagues from the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute and North Carolina Central University—introduce a guiding framework for advancing racial equity in research processes, environments, and among the research workforce.

NYC mayor Eric Adams recently created a policy that would allow law enforcement officers to involuntarily transport houseless individuals who appeared to be mentally ill to hospital emergency rooms for assessment. But will this policy actually help individuals who are unhoused? In this "Psychology Today" blog post, Duke Psychiatry's Jane Gagliardi, MD, MHS, outlines some of the reasons this policy is short-sighted and unhelpful, and she stresses the need to address the structural factors that predispose some people to poverty and housing insecurity.