News

Understanding intersecting cultural identities — and providing care that respects and affirms those identities — is at the heart of Tyson Pankey’s work as a clinician, educator, and researcher. Pankey, who joined the Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences faculty in September 2021, wants to help flip the script on how health care providers talk to and care for people in the LGBTQ+ community.

Six of our long-time faculty members are retiring from the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences this year. We are incredibly thankful for their service at Duke and wish them all the very best in their next chapter!

Congratulations to our trainees and faculty members who received year-end awards at our recent Graduate Medical Education graduation ceremony, including Outstanding Resident Educator, Outstanding Resident Clinician, Outstanding Resident Researcher, and outstanding teaching and mentoring awards for faculty members.

Jeffrey Swanson, PhD, can answer a lot of questions about gun violence. But as public shootings with multiple casualties have seemed to become an epidemic, Swanson has juggled a heavy schedule of media interviews in which reporters repeatedly ask a question he can't answer: why? In this article, he discusses some of the complexities of the issue.

Avion Simon and his siblings are among the more than 200,000 children and teens who have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID. Experts including Duke Psychiatry's Dr. Ernestine Briggs-King say—and research has demonstrated—that the trauma of losing a parent can have lifelong effects on our mental as well as physical health. This brief Scientific American documentary explores Avion's experience as an orphan, the effects of adverse childhood experiences and what can be done to minimize the long-term consequences of traumas like this one

Five decades ago, Duke psychologists Terrie Moffitt, PhD, and Avshalom Caspi, PhD, began working with a long-term study of 1,000 people in New Zealand to get a better perspective on how childhood factors may have led to adolescent behaviors, such as risk-taking. But after following all the children born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1972 and ‘73 for several decades, the married researchers’ questions began to shift: How were the childhood differences reflected in middle age health, and how is it, as the group enters its 50s, that they all seem to be aging at different rates?

Throughout his career at the Duke student counseling center, Joe Talley, PhD—also a professor in Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences—has tried to help students find their own sustainable solutions. He'll retire in June after 45 years of service.

Three Duke Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences residents were awarded American Psychiatric Association (APA) and American Psychiatric Association Foundation (APAF) fellowships.

Four members of the Duke faculty have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, including Avshalom Caspi, PhD, Edward M. Arnett Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Terrie E. Moffitt, PhD, Nannerl O. Keohane University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. Caspi and Moffitt also hold faculty appointments in Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences.

In this article from the American Society on Aging's Generations Journal, Duke Psychiatry's Katherine Ramos, PhD, provides an overview about the mental health impacts of COVID-19 in the lives of older adults, with a special focus on isolation, loneliness and trauma. She elucidates the inequities seen in mental health impacts and offers a call to action for the future of older adult mental health care.