Mindy Thompson Fullilove

Verified

Mindy verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Mindy verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• MD
• Professor Emeritus at New School

This chapter discusses the structural factors that undermine mental health and locates social structure in geographic place. It proposes that "magic strategies" -- complex, multi-system, multi-scale interventions -- are essential for physical and mental health.

This article reports the results of a community-based, participatory action research project comparing Shaw, in Washington, DC, and Orange, NJ, which were at diff erent stages in the process of gentrification. We were specifically interested in sources of stress that may lead to physical and mental illness. Our data show that gentrification, a form...

This chapter examines the K-drama "Crash Landing on You" to look at issues in trauma-informed placemaking and its relevance to a research team in the United States.

This is an essay about the costs of eminent domain, using the example of US urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s.

The U.S. population has suffered worse health consequences owing to COVID-19 than comparable wealthy nations. COVID-19 had caused more than 1.1 million deaths in the U.S. as of May 2023 and contributed to a 3-year decline in life expectancy. A coalition of public health workers and community activists launched an external review of the Centers for...

In the philosophical system of American Apartheid, “race” is a fact, racial hierarchy a key corollary, and “separation of races” in status, rights, and geography a logical inference. The concept of racial hierarchy proved useful in the early colonial period in Virginia and elsewhere, first begun in the 1600s to keep indentured servants and enslaved...

Could clinicians help people more if they were buddhas? This article considers what the late Thích Nhâ't Hanh meant in his call to "become buddhas" and applies Nhâ't Hanh's mindfulness practices to managing crises and anxiety in health care settings. This article also considers recovery strategies, techniques for becoming calm, and reminders about...

Context: Unaffordable or insecure housing is associated with poor health in children and adults. Tenant-based housing voucher programs (voucher programs) limit rent to 30% or less of household income to help households with low income obtain safe and affordable housing. Objective: To determine the effectiveness of voucher programs in improving h...

This paper describes a 2020 effort by the Cities Research Group of the University of Orange, United States, to create and pilot educational materials that could help organizations participate in collective recovery from the converging crises of the Covid-19 pandemic, racial oppression and climate change. Because of “shelter-in-place” strategies for...

Main streets are an amalgam of civic, commercial, and public spaces that serve as urban places of connection and exchange. Many factors have undermined the commercial functions of main street, but the Covid-19 pandemic has been a particularly severe stressor. This paper describes the manner in which the University of Orange Music City team planned...

The 400 Years of Inequality Project was created to call organizations to observe the 400th anniversary of the first Africans landing in Jamestown in 1619. The project focused on the broad ramifications of inequality. Used as a justification of chattel slavery, structures of inequality continue to condition the lives of many groups in the US. Over 1...

This article reviews the accomplishments of the "400 Years of Inequality" Project, which called for observances of the anniversary of the 1619 landing of Africans at Jamestown to be sold into bondage.

This essay discusses the concept of "working class intellectual" as outlined by Ernest Thompson, a black union leader and community organizer. Thompson's guidance on urbanism is described, highlighting his ecological orientation, commitment to being programmatic and use of coalition.

In this essay, we tackle the challenge of adapting the dominant way we think about health in the United States—through an individualistic, technocratic, biomedical lens—to address social problems rooted in structural inequality. As scholar activists, the authors participated in a coalition effort to improve community health in a postindustrial New...

Context: Poor physical and mental health and substance use disorder can be causes and consequences of homelessness. Approximately 2.1 million persons per year in the United States experience homelessness. People experiencing homelessness have high rates of emergency department use, hospitalization, substance use treatment, social services use, arr...

This piece discusses the history of inequality in the US that has roots in the origins of slavery.

Main Streets are civic/commercial centers of neighborhoods. They are also nodes in regional networks of streets, which together create a net of connection referred to here as the ‘tangle.’ This tangle serves as a physical substrate for community interconnection and its expression as collective efficacy. We examine two regions hit by disaster. We po...

This paper reflects upon a lifetime of scholarship and activism which has sought to increase the urban policy literacy of psychiatrists and the psychiatric literacy of urban policy makers. She underscores the generative importance in her thinking of a unique intellectual ‘progressive’ niche-milieu which emerged in US psychiatry in the late 1970s an...

The chapter describes teaching urbanism in a track in the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

A gentrification wave is sweeping across metropolitan America, yet we know very little about the health consequences of this current neighborhood redevelopment trend across different community contexts. This article describes an interdisciplinary, comparative, community-based participatory action (CBPA) research project investigating how housing, c...

The challenge we authors of this case faced was that of learning how to teach urbanism, the science of cities, to students in the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. There were several steps in the process. We, ourselves, had to learn to be urbanists. We had to win support for this systems approach. Then we had to develop teaching...

Students may lose knowledge and skills achieved in the school year during the summer break, with losses greatest for students from low-income families. Community Guide systematic review methods were used to summarize evaluations (published 1965-2015) of the effectiveness of year-round school calendars (YRSCs) on academic achievement, a determinant...

Expanded in-school instructional time (EISIT) may reduce racial/ethnic educational achievement gaps, leading to improved employment, and decreased social and health risks. When targeted to low-income and racial/ethnic minority populations, EISIT may thus promote health equity. Community Guide systematic review methods were used to search for qualif...

The current forms of American Apartheid express longstanding and persistent dynamics of segregation and serial forced displacement that have successfully adapted to challenge over several centuries. Segregation confines non-white people to closely specified areas while serial forced displacement moves them repeatedly from one place to another. Both...

In Syracuse, New York the social determinants of trauma from neighborhood violence are rooted in historical processes, including urban renewal, the Rockefeller drug laws, and de-industrialization. These contributed to destabilizing Syracuse communities of color, resulting in disproportionate incarceration, family disruption, and economic devastatio...

Children from low-income and racial or ethnic minority populations in the U.S. are less likely to have a conventional source of medical care and more likely to develop chronic health problems than are more-affluent and non-Hispanic white children. They are more often chronically stressed, tired, and hungry, and more likely to have impaired vision a...

The United States has pursued policies of urban upheaval that have undermined social organization, dispersed people, particularly African Americans, and increased rates of disease and disorder. Healthcare institutions have been, and can be, a part of this problem or a part of the solution. This essay addresses two tools that healthcare providers ca...

The aim of this study was to investigate the contribution of main streets to community social cohesion, a factor important to health. Prior work suggests that casual contact in public space, which we call "sociability," facilitates more sustained social bonds in the community. We appropriate the term "hospitality" to describe a main street's propen...

Context: Children in low-income and racial and ethnic minority families often experience delays in development by 3 years of age and may benefit from center-based early childhood education. Design: A meta-analysis on the effects of early childhood education by Kay and Pennucci best met Community Guide criteria and forms the basis of this review....

Low-income and minority status in the United States are associated with poor educational outcomes, which, in turn, reduce the long-term health benefits of education. This systematic review assessed the extent to which out-of-school-time academic (OSTA) programs for at-risk students, most of whom are from low-income and racial/ethnic minority famili...

High school completion (HSC) is an established predictor of long-term morbidity and mortality. U.S. rates of HSC are substantially lower among students from low-income families and most racial/ethnic minority populations than students from high-income families and the non-Hispanic white population. This systematic review assesses the effectiveness...

Fresh Youth Initiatives (FYI) is an organization that promotes community service, including organizing to fight violence, in Washington Heights, New York. In 2003 FYI proposed building a new headquarters in a troubled section of the neighbourhood. In order to assess the impact of this building on the local environment, the Community Research Group...

Context: Children from low-income and minority families are often behind higher-income and majority children in language, cognitive, and social development even before they enter school. Because educational achievement has been shown to improve long-term health, addressing these delays may foster greater health equity. This systematic review asses...

Sex-for-drugs and money exchanges have been demonstrated to be the vital link between the crack cocaine epidemic and accelerated rates of HIV infections among inner-city young adults in the United States. This paper explores the inadvertent public policy contributions that have reinforced this link and subsequent spread of HIV. It is our hypotheses...

CLIMB (City Life Is Moving Bodies) is a Northern Manhattan community-academic partnership founded by Columbia University affiliated faculty and local residents on the belief that safe parks and neighborhoods are essential to community health. The purpose of the partnership is to combat the problems of violence, drugs, obesity, and sedentary lifesty...

African Americans, compared to white Americans, under-utilize mental health services. Church-based programs are effective in reducing racial disparities in health; however, the literature on church-based programs for depression is limited. The purpose of this study was to explore ministers' perceptions about depression and the feasibility of utiliz...

In 2000, there was a major fireworks explosion in the city of Enschede in the Netherlands. Mediant, the local mental health service, held to the philosophy that avoiding victimization and helping people to regain autonomy was its main target. Hence, Mediant was reluctant to offer psychiatric help in the first month after the disaster, because "bein...

African Americans, compared with white Americans, underutilize mental health services for major depressive disorder. Church-based programs are effective in reducing racial disparities in health; however, the literature on church-based programs for depression is limited. The purpose of this study was to explore ministers' perceptions about depressio...

While the definition of “refugee” varies by different international organizations, all include aspects of displacement (Williams & Westermeyer, 1986). However, because of the slower nature of the events, climate change will also create a new kind of refugee who will be either nondisplaced or minimally displaced geographically, but who instead will...

Community displacing events, natural or human made, are increasing in frequency. By the end of 2009, over 36 million people were known to be displaced worldwide. Displacement is a traumatic experience with significant short- and long-term health consequences. The losses and costs associated with displacement-social connections, employment, property...

Serial forced displacement has been defined as the repetitive, coercive upheaval of groups. In this essay, we examine the history of serial forced displacement in American cities due to federal, state, and local government policies. We propose that serial forced displacement sets up a dynamic process that includes an increase in interpersonal and s...

Background: Fresh Youth Initiatives (FYI) is an organization that promotes community service, including organizing to fight violence, in Washington Heights, NY. In 2003 FYI proposed to build a new headquarters in a troubled section of the neighborhood. In order to assess the impact of this building on the local environment, we worked with FYI to de...

Background: Northern Manhattan has more than 500 acres of public parkland and the High Bridge, part of the historic Old Croton Aqueduct. While some parks are well-utilized, the High Bridge site is underutilized and the bridge remains closed to the public due to the neighborhoods' history of violence during the 80s and 90s. The positive impact of...

We assessed the effectiveness of various systems of community participation in ethical review of environmental health research. We used situation analysis methods and a global workspace theoretical framework to conduct comparative case studies of 3 research organizations at 1 medical center. We found a general institutional commitment to community...

This chapter focuses on a series of neighborhood-level social/structural processes that have influenced the spread of HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, and tuberculosis in the United States. Through the lens offered by three highly social processes, it examines the ways in which fundamental causes of disease, in the sense proposed by Link and Phelan (1995)...

Rationale We propose narrative evidence-based medicine as a necessary elaboration of the NIH translational research roadmap. The roadmap defined two complex obstacles, T1 and T2, to the progress of research from the ‘bench’ or basic laboratory science to the ‘bedside’ or clinical application, the traversal of which requires emergence of complex tra...

In 1996 Eilenberg and colleagues reviewed 180 charts and reported that trauma histories were poorly documented at a general psychiatric clinic. This study is a ten-year replication of that work. A total of 107 randomly selected charts from the same clinic were reviewed for assessment of trauma history. The quality of the assessments was rated. Fift...

The 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City represented a new strain on already fractured communities with low collective efficacy. Like the majority of citizens in the greater metropolitan area, researchers at the Community Research Group of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health wanted to "do" something to help in the aftermath of th...

Objective: In 1996 Eilenberg and colleagues reviewed 180 charts and reported that trauma histories were poorly documented at a general psychiatric clinic. This study is a ten-year replication of that work. Methods: A total of 107 randomly selected charts from the same clinic were reviewed for assessment of trauma history. The quality of the assessm...

This essay represents a collaboration between two teams, the United States-based Community Research Group and the Dutch Mediant Psychiatric Group. The first part of the essay draws on the work of the American-based Community Research Group (CRG), which is co-led by Drs. Mindy and Robert Fullilove. For the past fifteen years, CRG has conducted studi...

The ’real world’ is always perceived through one’s cultural and developmental blinders, and assigned meaning from that context. Those who have endured the 20th century – the consequences of two World Wars, preparations for Global Thermonuclear War, the aftermath of a closely associated colonialism, and its rebirth as neocolonialism – have observed...

Here we explore how public policy and economic practice, which are quintessential expressions of collective consciousness, in synergism with historical trajectory, create an opportunity structure that is a tunable, highly patterned, ’nonwhite noise’ in a generalized epidemiological stochastic resonance which efficiently amplifies unhealthy living a...

According to the structure of the underlying language of which a message is a particular expression, some messages are more ‘meaningful’ than others, that is, are in accord with the grammar and syntax of the language. The Shannon-McMillan or Asymptotic Equipartition Theorem, describes how messages themselves are to be classified.

A particularly striking example of canonical failure in public health, and a clear dysfunction of distributed institutional cognition/collective consciousness, involves systematic and widespread inadequate response to AIDS in the United States. Here we examine that pattern from the perspectives of this analysis, first for a geographic region near t...

Cognition is not consciousness. Most mental, and many physiological, functions, while cognitive in a formal sense, hardly ever become entrained into the Global Workspace of individual consciousness: one seldom is able to consciously regulate immune function, blood pressure, or the details of binocular tracking and bipedal motion, except to decide ’...

The study of individual consciousness has again become academically acceptable, following nearly a century of ideologically-enforced silence on the topic, the ’dark night of behaviorism’, as it were. Late 19th Century studies, summarized by William James (1890), have been revived, reinterpreted, and reinvigorated by quite a number of researchers, r...

Some insight regarding the depth, breadth, and subtlety of failure mode complexities affecting collective consciousness can be gained from the study of failures in a system having but a single global workspace, i.e. the human mind (Wallace, 2005b). The result is not reassuring.

This book expands a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars model of individual consciousness to an institutional venue in which multiple ‘Global Workspaces’ cooperate, communicate, and compete. The result is an expansion of Dretske’s necessary conditions communications theory approach to high level cognition, having potential applications rangi...

Black Americans are more likely than Whites to die of cancer and heart disease, more likely to get diabetes and asthma, and less likely to get preventive care and screening. Some of this greater morbidity results from education, income level, and environment as well as access to health care. But the traditional medical model does not always allow f...

The independent, nonfederal Task Force on Community Preventive Services (Task Force), which directs the development of the Guide to Community Preventive Services (Community Guide), conducted a systematic review of published scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of laws and policies that facilitate the transfer of juveniles to the adult c...

Universal school-based programs to reduce or prevent violent behavior are delivered to all children in classrooms in a grade or in a school. Similarly, programs targeted to schools in high-risk areas (defined by low socioeconomic status or high crime rates) are delivered to all children in a grade or school in those high-risk areas. During 2004-200...

Universal, school-based programs, intended to prevent violent behavior, have been used at all grade levels from pre-kindergarten through high school. These programs may be targeted to schools in a high-risk area-defined by low socioeconomic status or high crime rate-and to selected grades as well. All children in those grades receive the programs i...

The independent, nonfederal Task Force on Community Preventive Services (Task Force), which directs development of the Guide to Community Preventive Services (Community Guide), has conducted a systematic review of published scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of laws and policies that facilitate the transfer of juveniles to the adult c...

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused massive destruction throughout the Gulf Coast of the United States. While the disaster itself caused many deaths and billions of dollars of destruction, the grave failures of disaster relief and post-disaster rebuilding have eclipsed the storm in the damage they have done. By contrast, after a massive explosion de...

We address themes of distributed cognition by extending recent formal developments in the theory of individual consciousness. While single minds appear biologically limited to one dynamic structure of linked cognitive submodules instantiating consciousness, organizations, by contrast, can support several, sometimes many, such constructs simultaneou...

George Engel, in his classic article on the biopsychosocial model of psychiatry, argued that a patient's full recovery might depend on interventions in systems outside of the individual's body, such as in the family system, the hospital system or other social systems within which the individual is nested (Engel, 1980). He pointed out that these sys...

What happened on September 11th? Most clinicians and mental health professionals would say that what happened on September 11, 2001, was a terrorist attack that traumatized people at rates relative to their exposure to the event. Based on this assumption, the mental health system enumerated symptoms and mobilized resources for individual treatment....

The findings of health disparities research will have to be disseminated to a broad public in order to influence health outcomes. Some strategies for dissemination are obvious, and these generally work for ideas that are within the mainstream of current paradigms. However, ideas that challenge existing theories and assumptions may require different...

A city is a self-integrated system of people who are in competition with one another. Many processes can disrupt the integrity of the human settlements linked to cities. This chapter presents examples of managing some of the "internal enemies": disinvestment, development-induced displacement, mismanagement of the environment, armed conflict, and di...