Russell Searight

• Ph.D., MPH
• Professor at Lake Superior State University

Health inequity is pervasive, and at the same time, different perspectives of what “health” is change the definition of health inequity across cultures. That said, some lack access to healthcare, and during the pandemic, this has become even more evident. The noble goal of reaching health equity should guide efforts of psychologists, recognizing th...

L’esclavage transnational est un phénomène de plus en plus répandu dans l’économie mondialisée actuelle. Jusqu’à aujourd’hui, les travaux de recherche se sont principalement penchés sur le trafic sexuel et les femmes qui en sont victimes, de sorte qu’il y a un important manque à gagner dans la recherche sur les besoins des victimes de ce phénomène,...

Positive Psychology, focusing on character strengths and virtues, meaning in life, and transcendence, encourages students to reflect on their lives. The course frequently uses questionnaires and assigned activities to promote reflection and resilience. While mandated by many universities, course assessment in higher education is typically character...

This paper presents a first-person account of using qualitative research methods to address medical residency education. The results of this project have been published. However, the study's process and its educational impact on the participants have not been well-described. The purpose of this article is to describe the background and conduct of t...

The COVID pandemic raised several significant ethical issues, including life and death dilemmas. Bioethics is a relatively new discipline. There are, however, several commonly accepted models for addressing clinical issues in healthcare such as deontology, utilitarianism, principlism, and virtue ethics. Public health ethics is not as well developed...

COVID-19 has highlighted a number of pre-existing social determinants of health and issues in providing health care. In addition, the pandemic has led to changes in society, medical practice, and international public health. COVID-19 was likely a zoonotic illness—these animal-to-human transmitted diseases are becoming increasingly common. Reports o...

There were multiple ongoing social, political, and health care issues occurring at the time of the pandemic’s rapid onset and worldwide spread. These factors all played a significant role in how governmental leaders and citizens responded to measures such as lockdowns, wearing face masks, and being vaccinated. Populist political figures often denie...

While some controversy persists, COVID-19’s origins appear to be in a “wet market” in Hunan China. However, there are a minority of scientists who believe that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory. COVID-19 along with SARS and HIV is a zoonotic illness in which a virus “jumps” from an animal to humans. The mortality rate for those contractin...

The COVID-19 vaccine was produced and disseminated in a briefer time frame than other vaccines. Vaccination is considered one of public health’s great achievements and has resulted in major declines in infectious diseases and an extended lifespan. Mandated vaccines have a long history of controversy and there have been a limited number of deaths in...

First-generation (F.G.) university students whose parents did not attend college comprise 30-50% of those pursuing higher education in the United States. Research suggests that compared with those whose parents attended college, F.G. students are less likely to graduate. American universities reflect upper middle class values, implying that academi...

This article evaluates and elucidates the intersections across social and economic determinants of health and social structures that maintain current inequities and structural violence with a focus on the impact on imMigrants (immigrants and migrants), refugees, and those who remain invisible (e.g., people without immigration status who reside in t...

Introductory psychology is typically presented to undergraduates as a set of loosely related topics reflecting the organization of most textbooks. The empirically based evidence presented in the topical format is likely to be limited by progressive knowledge obsolesce and replicability challenges impacting contemporary science. We suggest that psyc...

Differentiation of Self (DoS) is the balance between emotional and intellectual functioning. A central construct in Bowen's intergenerational family therapy theory is the challenge between individual identity and maintaining close personal relationships. However, while operationalized with the Differentiation of Self Inventory-Revised (DSI-R), diff...

This conceptual paper provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare disparities and particularly its impact on marginalized communities. This critical analysis addresses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 10, and 16, which include health and well-being, reduction of inequality between and within countries, and...

Inequities still exist in today's society, and this book advances awareness, an equitable mindset, and transformative change toward the goal of eliminating inequities and promoting inclusiveness and social justice. Racialized inequity is injustice or unfairness and exists when prejudice or discrimination based on any aspect of difference precludes...

Originally a Freudian mechanism, projection, in personality, refers to the influence of intrapsychic content and processes on the identification and interpretation of external stimuli. According to their adherents, projective instruments such as the Rorschach, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and Draw‐a‐Person, provide access to unconscious aspect...

With the aging of the population in Western countries, assessment of mental capacity is increasingly common request of practicing psychologists. The term,” competency” is being replaced both in legal and clinical settings with “decision‐making capacity.” Capacity is context dependent and a growing number of specific domains have been identified inc...

Respiratory symptoms, including shortness of breath, choking sensations, and lightheadedness, are common features of panic attacks. Patients with respiratory disorders, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), exhibit an elevated risk of developing panic disorder. The current study examines the association between self-repor...

With the aging of the population in Western countries, assessment of mental capacity is increasingly common request of practicing psychologists. The term,” competency” is being replaced both in legal and clinical settings with “decision‐making capacity.” Capacity is context dependent and a growing number of specific domains have been identified inc...

Originally a Freudian mechanism, projection, in personality, refers to the influence of intrapsychic content and processes on the identification and interpretation of external stimuli. According to their adherents, projective instruments such as the Rorschach, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and Draw‐a‐Person, provide access to unconscious aspect...

Film is a form of engaging narrative being employed with greater frequency in undergraduate and graduate education. To optimize their pedagogical impact, it is important to carefully select films that address core course objectives. Additionally, viewing should be structured with written guidelines to direct the audience to consider the relevant di...

Advance care planning can take a number of forms including discussions with family members that are not formally documented, similar discussions with one’s physician, and directives for level of care during hospitalization such as do not resuscitate (DNR) orders.

As is evident in the case of Mrs. Kim from Chap. 1, when confronted with serious illness, family relationships are a key element of patient decision-making. While clinicians, including the author, have encountered situations where the family and the patient are at odds with one another about optimal treatment, it is important that healthcare provid...

The differences in views of advance directives, hospice care and do not resuscitate orders that characterize different ethnic and cultural groups may appear illogical to healthcare professionals of White European background.

While patients’ and family preferences for nondisclosure of life-threatening illness found among contemporary Native Americans and Asian Americans may seem to be a cultural anomaly, a brief review of physician practices and legal rulings in the 20th century suggests that disclosure of this information to patients is a relatively recent practice.

This admonition from members of the Navajo community arose in response to the discussions of terminal illness and a patient’s desire for life-support—both of which are implicit topics in discussions of advance directives.

Telling patients the truth about a life-threatening condition is less common outside of the United States.

While medical ethics can be dated back to the Ancient Greeks, cotemporary bioethics’ origin is typically dated to the early 1970s.

This book provides an up-to-date description of cross-cultural aspects of end-of-life decision-making. The work places this discussion in the context of developments in the United States such as the emphasis on patient informed consent, “right to die” legal cases, and the federal Patient Self-Determination Act. With the globalization of health care...

Family physicians spend substantial time counseling patients with psychiatric conditions, unhealthy behaviors, and medical adherence issues. Maintaining efficiency while providing counseling is a major challenge. There are several effective, structured counseling strategies developed for use in primary care settings. The transtheoretical (stages of...

With an increasing population of persons with limited English proficiency (LEP), psychologists are likely to need to conduct assessments through a foreign language interpreter at times. The goal of the interpreter-mediated patient encounter should be to approximate a language-congruent clinical encounter. Issues such as the spatial configuration of...

Reviews the book, Guantanamo and Other Cases of Enforced Medical Treatment: A Biopolitical Analysis by Mirko Daniel Garasic (see record 2015-57596-000 ). In this book Garasic, a political philosopher and bioethicist, applies ethical principles to contemporary cases, including adults with severe anorexia nervosa, death row inmates with schizophrenia...

While summative evaluations in the form of examinations, term papers, standardized tests, and end-of-term student ratings of instructors are common forms of assessment in higher education, much less attention has been devoted to formative assessment. By obtaining ongoing feedback while a course is in progress, formative assessment can provide detai...

In four year colleges, advanced undergraduate students commonly provide academic support services. While the benefits of peer education for recipients are well established, the benefits for providers are not well known. We conducted two focus groups with peer educators (PEs). A prominent theme was the appreciation of the perceived stigma and embarr...

Curriculum Vita as of December 2014

With the opening of China in 1979, there has been increased interest in Western approaches to understanding, diagnosis, and treating psychological distress. Accessible research and clinical reports for non-Chinese speakers are limited. This scarcity also reflects the limited period of time in which Western psychology and psychiatry have been availa...

According to the dominant models of medical ethics in the United States and many Western countries, physician disclosure of information such as diagnosis, treatment options, and prognosis is considered an essential precondition for patient informed consent. While being consistent with the principle of patient autonomy stressed in many Western healt...

An undergraduate course, "Psychology and Film," was developed as an honors elective. Each week students and the instructor viewed a feature film depicting a psychological disorder or related issue such as family dysfunction, resilience, or death and dying. Accompanying assigned readings featured first person accounts of mental health problems and p...

Historian Matthew Heaton’s Black Skin, White Coats describes the development of Nigerian psychiatry at a critical point during the post-colonial period. Heaton focuses primarily on the years from the early 1950s to the 1980s with particular attention to the contributions of Nigeria’s first native-born psychiatrist, T. Adeoye Lambo. The historical n...

This paper describes a newly developed undergraduate university course¸ “Medical Ethics and Film.” During the semester, students viewed a series of feature films portraying dilemmas in bioethics. Prior to the films, a series of brief lectures, covering ethical theories influencing health care, was presented. In subsequent classes, immediately befor...

This study examined the influence of art-making in a sample of 44 undergraduate students. Participants were randomly assigned to a control group or one of three art-making groups. Students in all groups completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Mini-POMS prior to and after a twenty minute participation in one of the four groups. Individua...

This paper describes a newly developed undergraduate university course¸ “Medical Ethics and Film.” During the semester, students viewed a series of feature films portraying dilemmas in bioethics. Prior to the films, a series of brief lectures, covering ethical theories influencing health care, was presented. In subsequent classes, immediately befor...

The Social Paradigm Belief Inventory (SPBI) is a self-report scale developed to assess post-formal thought, a stage of cognitive development characteristic of emerging adulthood. The SPBI is influenced by William Perry's theory that young adults pass through three major stages of cognitive development, dualism, relativism and multiplicity. In the S...

Reviews the book, Closing the Asylums: Causes and Consequences of the Deinstitutionalization Movement by George Paulson (see record 2012-21587-000 ). From 1955 through 1990, deinstitutionalization (DI) policies decreased the census of state mental hospitals by 80 percent in the absence of a coherent community care system (Mechanic & Rochefort, 1992...

Approximately 20% of the U.S. population speaks a language other than English at home. There is empirical evidence suggesting that mental health problems in the U.S. are more common among persons with limited English proficiency (LEP). As a result, the presence of foreign language interpreters in mental health encounters is likely to be more common...

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD), characterized by impulsivity, distractibility, and inattention, has an estimated pediatric population prevalence of 6-8%. Family physicians and pediatricians evaluate and treat the majority of children with this condition. The evidence-based treatment of choice for ADHD, stimulant medication, contin...

The Family-of-Origin Scale (FOS) is a 40-item rating scale in which respondents provide a retrospective assessment of the family in which they were raised. While the FOS was found to be psychometrically sound, there has been a history of controversy about the scale's factor structure. A recent study published in this journal (Petrogiannis & Softas-...

At present, approximately one-fifth of the U.S. population speaks alanguage other than English at home. In addition, many recentimmigrants to the United States have mental health issues. As a result,many mental health professionals are interviewing and treating patientswith the assistance of an interpreter. While research on medicalinterpreters ind...

A brief psychotherapy model based on systems theory is presented. The model emphasizes the interactional context of clients' problems and represents an efficient intervention paradigm.

University students frequently send and receive cellular phone text messages during classroom instruction. Cognitive psychology research indicates that multi-tasking is frequently associated with performance cost. However, university students often have considerable experience with electronic multi-tasking and may believe that they can devote neces...

Parents of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) are often seeking information about complementary and/or alternative medical treatments (CAM) for their child's condition. The interest in CAM for AD/HD likely stems from parental concern about children taking a Schedule II controlled substance for multiple years. In addition...

Reviews the book, The human illnesses: Neuropsychiatric disorders and the nature of the human brain by Peter C. Williamson and John M. Allman (see record 2010-26488-000 ). Williamson and Allman provide an array of current research findings on the neurophysiology, anatomy, and genetics of common mental disorders as well as evolutionary explanations...

Reviews the book, The development of shyness and social withdrawal by Kenneth H. Rubin and Robert J. Coplan (see record 2010-13171-000 ). The 14 chapters in this book summarize current research on child and adolescent shyness, social anxiety disorder, social withdrawal, behavioral inhibition, and related constructs. While the earlier chapters of th...

Reviews the book, The weight of a mustard seed: The intimate story of an Iraqi general and his family during thirty years of tyranny by Wendell Steavenson (see record 2009-09355-000 ). How do you live when the threat of imprisonment and execution by the government that you represent is a daily possibility? When these horrible consequences are not s...

Many undergraduate programs require students to complete an independent research project in their major field prior to graduation. These projects are typically described as opportunities for integration of coursework and a direct application of the methods of inquiry specific to a particular discipline. Evaluations of curricular projects have usual...

Given the growing linguistic diversity in the United States, many practicing psychologists will work with foreign language interpreters. However, few clinicians receive formal training in providing interpreter-aided psychological services. By federal law (88th Congress, 1964; PL-88-352), psychologists or their agencies are responsible for providing...

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a small-group pedagogical technique widely used in fields such as business, medicine, engineering, and architecture. In PBL, pre-written cases are used to teach core course content. PBL advocates state that course material is more likely to be retained and applied when presented as cases reflecting "real life" applic...

Although it is often unrecognized, family physicians provide a significant amount of mental health care in the United States. Time is one of the major obstacles to providing counseling in primary care. Counseling approaches developed specifically for ambulatory patients and traditional psychotherapies modified for primary care are efficient first-l...

Reviews the book, ACT in practice: Case conceptualization in acceptance and commitment therapy by Patricia A. Bach and Daniel J. Moran (see record 2008-01148-000). Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) views language as the initial cause of psychopathology and focuses on "bring[ing] language and thought under appropriate contextual control" (Ha...

Reviews the book, The physician as patient: A clinical handbook for mental health professionals by Michael F. Myers and Glen O. Gabbard (see record 2008-01949-000 ). Myers and Gabbard's examination of mental health problems among physicians, illustrated with detailed case vignettes, reveals a much deeper understanding of the topic than has previous...

Mental health professionals in general hospital settings are frequently asked to provide consultative opin-ions about patients' capacity for medical decisions and self-care. Adult patients are assumed to be au-tonomous decision makers unless they have been determined to be incompetent through a judicial pro-ceeding. In reality, however, clinical ju...

Reviews the film, The Beales of Grey Gardens directed by Albert Maysles and David Maysles (2006). This film is a documentary film made from previously unseen footage recorded while the directors were making the original film, Grey Gardens, released in 1976 (the original has recently been adapted into a Broadway musical and is being made into a fe...

Reviews the book, The medicalization of society: On the transformation of human conditions into treatable disorders by Peter Conrad (see record 2007-03973-000). Conrad concisely defines medicalization as "a process by which nonmedical problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illness and disorders" (p. 4). Commo...

Up to 60% of ambulatory primary care patients have psychosocial factors contributing to their symptom presentation. Counseling, although helpful, is seen as requiring specialized training that most primary care physicians lack, as well as being complex and time-consuming. Several counseling methods have been developed that are brief, relatively eas...

Reviews the book, The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (see record 2006-20301-000). According to Searight, this novel describes several days around a holiday in the life of Frank Bascombe, a former short story writer and sportswriter, currently a realtor living on the New Jersey coast. Events unfold over Thanksgiving week of 2000. The presidential...

Reviews the book, Essentials of psychosomatic medicine by James L. Levenson (see record 2006-21083-000 ). Essentials of Psychosomatic Medicine is a briefer and updated version of Levenson's 2005 Textbook of Psychosomatic Medicine. The current text includes 19 chapters. With the exception of the initial chapter, providing an overview of the key elem...

Fetal alcohol exposure affects approximately 1% to 3% of live births in the United States. Family physicians are in a unique position to reduce the incidence of alcohol-exposed pregnancy. Fetal alcohol exposure can be minimized through 2 general approaches: reducing alcohol consumption or increasing effective contraception among childbearing-aged w...

Reviews the book, Evidence-Based Psychopharmacology ,edited by Dan Stein, Bernard Lerer, and Stephen Stahl (see record 2005-14567-000 ). Evidence-Based Psychopharmacology is organized into 12 chapters--10 reviewing outcome research on 10 specific psychiatric disorders, with a chapter on drug interactions and an introductory section reviewing eviden...

International medical graduates (IMGs), many of whom are recent immigrants to the United States, are filling an increasing proportion of U.S. family medicine residency positions. Therefore, assumptions about the training experiences of first-year residents may no longer apply to a large percentage of incoming residents. The authors sought to improv...

Reviews the video, Sleep and Sleep Disorders (2003) with Edward Stepanski, and Jon Carlson as moderator. For psychologists interested in embarking in the field of behavioral sleep medicine, expert Edward Stepanski and host Jon Carlson provide an excellent introduction to the behavioral assessment and treatment of insomnia in the American Psychologi...

Patient autonomy is a primary value in US health care. It is assumed that patients want to be fully and directly informed about serious health conditions and want to engage in advance planning about medical care at the end-of-life. Written advance directives and proxy decision-makers are vehicles to promote autonomy when patients are no longer able...

Reviews Somatoform Dissociation: Phenomena, Measurement and Theoretical Issues by Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis (2004; see record 2004-20163-000 ). Nijenhuis has written a series of research reports and theoretical articles asserting that posttraumatic somatoform symptoms are a form of dissociation and has organized his writings as a book. Through scale d...

Ethnic minorities currently compose approximately one third of the population of the United States. The U.S. model of health care, which values autonomy in medical decision making, is not easily applied to members of some racial or ethnic groups. Cultural factors strongly influence patients' reactions to serious illness and decisions about end-of-l...

This handbook is designed to be a toolbox of quickly accessible clinical resources for the psychologist working in primary care settings. The Handbook will help codify the newly established role of the primary care psychologist by providing clinicians with background knowledge of the primary care system, orienting frameworks for practice, overviews...

During the 1990s, approximately 300,000 Bosnian immigrants came to the United States as a result of the Balkan wars. In contrast to immigrants from less developed countries, Bosnian refugees were typically older, had experienced significant war related trauma, and were accustomed to universal health insurance coverage. There is little information a...