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Source: Boston University School of Public Health
Have A Laugh: Mental Health Minute
In a video presentation, clinical psychologist Gabrielle Roberts, from Advocate Children’s Hospital in Illinois, points out the impact of laughing on physical and mental health. Roberts strongly encourages family members to participate on a rotating basis in making the other family members laugh. This may look like assigning a schedule where one member oversees producing a laughable minute to share with the rest of the family per week. However, Roberts identifies this schedule as fluid, depending on household dynamics. Roberts’ main objective is to identify intentional laughter. Even in times of stress, taking time to find comical clips or review things that may have made you laugh in the past is extremely beneficial to your well-being.
Source: cbsnews.com
Introducing the New Public Health Chair
By David Larsen, Ph.D. MPH
Chair and Professor, Department of Public Health
David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics
Dear students,
In April 2023, my colleagues elected me as the new chair of the Department of Public Health at Syracuse University. I am excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead as I serve in this role, and I hope to get to know each of you. Please feel free to stop in and say hello.
As you consider your path toward graduation and beyond, I would like to share my circuitous path toward a public health career. As a child, I hated it when people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I just gave them my older brother’s answer: Air Force pilot. But I didn’t care about it as he did and didn’t pursue that career. I was a young adult before I knew what an epidemiologist even was.
At Brigham Young University, I studied psychology, principally because it was interesting to me. Perhaps I wanted to be a therapist? During the summer of my junior year, I worked as a backpacking guide for troubled teens at Red Cliff Ascent in Utah. Young people would arrive at this program (or
others like it) as an alternative to juvenile detention or at the behest or demand of their parents. Spending a week at a time in the high-altitude desert of southern Utah was amazing, and I took some time off from classes that fall to do my internship at Red Cliff. I learned that I did not want to be a therapist.
My winter job during college was teaching snowboarding at Sundance Ski Resort. If I could have made a decent living as a snowboard instructor, I might have continued that job, but all the older snowboard instructors lived in their vans. It wasn’t the life I wanted to pursue. Still, early-morning lift rides provide a great place to think, and I began to reflect more on global health issues I had observed in Brazil a few years prior. After my first year of university, I had served a religious mission for two years in Belém, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon River. It took me time to process the poverty that I had experienced in Brazil, including a lack of clean water, no access to basic sanitation and food insecurity. I had no framework for making sense of the situation. Over time, I realized that I wanted to pursue a career in addressing what I know now as social determinants of health and global health disparities.
How does one work on global health disparities? I considered the Peace Corps and applied to master of public health (MPH) programs that offered a master’s international and embedded a Peace Corps service into the curriculum. Tulane University felt right, and I decided to attend. Then, in July 2007, my general idea of a career in global health became laser-focused when I saw the National Geographic article “Bedlam in the Blood” about malaria. Here was this mosquito-borne parasite that is entirely preventable and treatable, killing more than 1 million young children every year. Wealthy nations had long ago eliminated malaria, but it plagued and continues to plague sub-Saharan Africa. I became passionate about fighting malaria and joined a research group working on the malaria problem in Zambia. I learned about insecticide-treated mosquito nets, indoor residual spraying and larval source control.
Throughout my studies, I noticed that malaria control focused on fighting the mosquito while ignoring the parasitic reservoir in the human population. I wrote proposals to study the impact of human-focused malaria control. Fortunately, one of these was funded, and four years after reading that first article on malaria, I was working with the Gates Foundation on a massive malaria testing and treatment trial in southern Zambia. It was a surreal moment. Just four years earlier, I had merely a vague impression of what I wanted to do with my career. Now, I was an epidemiologist, a profession I had not known existed for most of my life.
I hope you will find your “malaria,” a problem to inspire you and to which you can dedicate the next few years of your life. Whether your route is circuitous or not, the best lies ahead. With hard work and dedication, in four years it will be fun to reflect on how far you’ve
come.
Sincerely,
David Larsen
Professor Dave Larsen