Resuming Transmission

The past several months have been unusually full. My teaching load at ECU has included an undergraduate Honors seminar on Psychiatry, Ethics, and the Law, and a fourth-year medical school elective on Philosophy and Medicine. I have also been traveling at least once a month for the past six months to present at academic conferences, including the Eastern and Central Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association and several Grand Rounds talks on challenging psychiatric ethics cases. I serve as an ethics consultant on the ECU Medical Ethics Committee, and several writing projects have demanded more sustained attention than I initially anticipated. I hope that some of the people that I owe paper drafts are not reading this.

Photo: me in between sessions at the Eastern APA meeting in Baltimore.

One of those projects deserves more than a passing mention. I am now officially a Co-PI on an NIH/Fogarty International Center R25 grant: DIRECT — Enhancing Bioethics Capacities at Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHeS) in Malawi. The project has been years in the making. It began when I was a faculty member in the UNC Department of Psychiatry, where my colleagues Brad Gaynes, Stuart Rennie, and Gary Gala began discussing the possibility of working with some partners in Malawi. Brad, who directs the Division of Global Mental Health at UNC, introduced me to Drs. Kazione Kulisewa and Lucinda Manda-Taylor at KUHeS. Kazione heads the Department of Mental Health there, and Lucinda is an Associate Professor of Applied Ethics. They are now the Co-PIs with me and ECU and UNC as partners.

The grant has three core aims: (1) developing a Master’s Program in Bioethics at KUHeS, (2) creating research ethics curricula for psychiatry residents and NIH-funded researchers conducting mental health research in Malawi, and (3) writing scholarly papers about our process and the findings of our collaborations. It is work that sits at the intersection of global health, philosophy, and medicine.

I plan to write about progress on the grant here from time to time, alongside the other things this blog has always been about: psychiatry, philosophy, bioethics, and whatever else may currently occupy my attention. Let me know if there is something you would like to discuss here. I will be posting roughly twice a month going forward. I am glad to be back.