psych and cities substack
Sharing my substack which combines my interests in psychiatry and cities.
In psychiatry, we focus on probing, learning about, and characterizing people’s internal worlds. We use buckets of diagnoses to operationalize these internal experiences. Of course, the buckets cannot capture the full spectrum of how people organize and cope with their environment. And we’re only able to see an office- or hospital-based snippet of the person. People constantly adapt to new contexts, whether intentional or not. Our surroundings are dynamic, dictated by interpersonal connections, policies, and systemic and historically-based forces. In studying these external factors, the structures abutting their ability to function, we can establish a systems-level perspective of mental wellbeing.
This project will profile communities through the lens of longstanding residents, history, policy, and built environment. We will focus on the pragmatic — transportation, housing, infrastructure, jobs — and the theoretical. What makes a community? How does a community foster resilience and mental wellbeing? How does it adapt to changes? We will explore these questions by having conversations with cafe owners, community organizers, and families who have inhabited these neighborhoods for generations.
[https://open.substack.com/pub/readherestill\](https://open.substack.com/pub/readherestill)