I would describe my work as focused on innovative models of collaborative care targeting the needs of adults with serious mental health and housing needs.

Most of this work has focused on homeless populations and ways to engage and provide behavioral health, primary care, and social servic...

Not everybody is interested or capable of receiving traditional office-based mental health care for a variety of reasons.

So the challenge I am seeking to undertake is to reach, engage, and serve those who need other ways to receive mental health care.

This can be through new person...

My short-term goal is to develop interventions that are novel, different, and exciting to me and recipients. As one of my mentors often liked to say, most interventions do not work. But even if the interventions don’t end up working, it’s the adventure of science and research to develop new thing...

Like many people, policymakers are busy people so providing short concise ways to communicate to them (briefs, infographics, video clips) are important. In your communications, it should be clear what your ASK is and how it may benefit others.

So far, my role in policy activities has been ...

Since I work in public health, public engagement is an essential component of the work of me and my colleagues.

In other fields, public engagement often occurs at the end of the project when the findings are ready to be disseminated to the public.

However, in public health, public engagement can occur during the development of a project to obtain community buy-in, it can occur mid-way into the project to help troubleshoot some issues, and it occurs at the end of the project during the dissemination stage.

Engaging the public and com...

I would like to see more concerted efforts to combine pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Many prescribers know little about psychological therapy and many therapists know little about medications.

I’m fortunate to have been trained as a clinical psychologist to provide therapy but I also h...

Many conditions are best served by some combination of medication and therapy, and there are also many opportunities for both of these to also be combined with complementary and alternative medicine approaches as well.

How can progress in science & research contribute to the imp...

 I expect new technologies will continue to improve things in this respect. However, I think it’s also important to be careful about unintended consequences. In efforts to reduce stigma, we don’t want to trivialize mental illness, over-pathologize natural human reactions, or dismiss human propens...

About the author: Jack Tsai, PhD MSCP serves as Campus Dean and Professor of Public Health at UTHealth, and Research Director for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Homeless Programs Office. He is a clinical psychologist and previously served as a profe...