In the News

The Vision of Hope Award Gala, now in its eighth year, advocating with leaders and bringing together a mix of behavioral healthcare leaders with Tennessee’s generous philanthropic community. 

Three faculty members from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences — Warren Taylor, MD, MHSc, Paul Newhouse, MD, and William Petrie, MD — were recently honored at the 2022 American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP) Awards.

Important new paper by the Center for Cognitive Medicine's Alexander Conley, PhD providing further evidence that cognitive changes after menopause influence brain function and response to estrogen.

Assistant professor of Geriatric Psychiatry Patricia S. Andrews, M.D., recently served as lead author on the paper "Delirium, depression, and long-term cognition," published in the journal International Psychogeriatrics. In this new publication, Dr. Andrews et. al. found that patients with a depression history prior to ICU stay exhibit a greater severity of depressive symptoms in the year after hospitalization.

Assistant professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences Alexandra (Alex) Bettis, Ph.D., will be chairing a symposium, "The Role of Caregivers in Interventions for Youth Depression and Suicidality," at the annual meeting of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America in March 2022. Dr. Bettis, who also holds an appointment in Psychology & Human Development within Vanderbilt University, will present alongside Jessica Schwartzman Ph.D. (assistant professor of Psychiatry), Kirsty Clark, Ph.D.

Alan Lewis, M.D., Ph.D., was recently named an Associate Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). Lewis' membership officially began on Jan. 1, 2022.

Kristopher Kast, M.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, co-led a workshop with colleagues Heather Ward, M.D., of Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston and Tim Fong, M.D., of UCLA, at the most recent annual meeting of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, held virtually in December 2021. This workshop invited participating clinician educators to engage in curriculum design fostering research and scholarly activity for trainees in addiction psychiatry, applying the available evidence base to example curricula from the presenters' respective institutions.

Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Kimberly Brown Ph.D., ABPP, recently served as co-author on the article "Preliminary examination of an insanity defense typology: Prevalence rates and correlates" in the journal Behavioral Sciences & the Law. She was also invited to present her talk "Violence and Mental Illness" to California Department of State Hospitals .

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Joshua Ryan Smith, M.D., served as co-author on "Safety Planning for Suicidality in Autism: Obstacles, Potential Solutions, and Future Directions," published in the journal Pediatrics. He also has a pending publication titled "Letter to the Editor: Aripiprazole-induced Hypersexuality in an Autistic Child" in the Journal of Pediatric Psychopharmacology.

Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences faculty members David Marcovitz and Kristopher Kast, along with other internal and external co-authors, published the first article describing creation of a Hub-and-Spoke partnership for opioid use disorder in a Medicaid non-expansion state.  "Implementation of a Hub-and-Spoke Partnership for Opioid Use Disorder Treatment in a Medicaid Nonexpansion State" was published in the journal Psychiatric Services. Click here to read the article.