Public Engagement

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...

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For Mental Health Month we spoke to Dr Jack Tsai, ...

 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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...