Stress: Saturday 2:30 PM EST 1 May 2021. DUE TO COVID-19 THIS ROUNDTABLE WILL BE VIRTUAL WEBINAR STARTS 2:30PM EST ON 5/1
LINK TO REGISTER & YOUTUBE TBA A testament to its ubiquity, STRESS is woven into our very words, our thoughts and our emotions. We stress words to give them emphasis. We stress wood to make it stronger rather than splinter. And we feel distress, both when overwhelmed with dread, but also sometimes in joyous anticipation.
The chase creates stress. Loss and failure create stress. Even attaining the prize, whether chosen or befallen, can also deliver stress, and plenty, along with its winnings.
Change often means stress. Stress is the white noise of life, whether we perceive it or somehow manage to habituate to it.
Of late our culture has grown more attuned to the semiotics of stress, as it expresses itself in our brains and guts, our minds and bodies, our spirit and imagination. When it derives from a goal achieved, it may serve as fuel. But, with a pain inflicted, when choice is not possible, when we are the object rather the subject, stress corrosively imprints identity and erodes our resilience and potential for realization.
Current research reveals the severe effects of stress on the brain. It halts development, hinders plasticity, and entangles and ensnares the inner workings of our cells. Stress is tantamount to aging, and in excess it hastens the aging of our bodies and minds. At the level of society, persecution and bullying, neglect and injustice, scarcity and want, all inflict both individual and collective stress.
As a response to its presence, as individuals we move our bodies, amuse our minds, contain our impulses in meditation, create and enjoy music and art, arrange social engagements, and seek the sublime muse that Nature can be. We strive to redress sources of communal stress – through activism, a commitment to justice, and the lifting of noisome prejudices.
We invite you to relieve yourself of weekend stress by joining inspiring researchers and seekers as they describe the problems and seek solutions to stress.
This roundtable will also be streamed live and can be watched on Youtube (youtube.com/helixcenter) or on our website (helixcenter.org/videos)
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The Participants
Allison Avery is the Vice President of Inclusion and Community at Dow Jones, leading global diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) efforts. She has expertise, as both a practitioner and strategist, in DE&I, organizational culture, learning and development. She has held senior DE&I and People Team roles at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, LLP, NYU Langone Health and Hospital System, and NYU School of Medicine as the first Director of Diversity and Inclusion. In an advisory capacity, Allison was a Principal Consultant with Working Mother Media (Seramount), partnering with Global 500 companies on culture change strategies. Allison holds a Master of Arts in Applied Psychology from New York University and a professional certificate in HR Management from Cornell University, ILR School. She is a graduate of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association’s Post-Graduate LP program, where she maintained a private psychoanalytic practice for over 9 years and is completing her International Association of Analytical Psychology certification as a Jungian Analyst.
Ben Bernstein, Ph.D., is a psychologist, educator,and author, with an expertise on performance and test stress . An honors graduate of Bowdoin College, Bernstein received his doctorate in Applied Psychology from the University of Toronto and later a master’s degree in Music Composition from Mills College.
An educator for the last fifty years, Bernstein has taught at every level of the educational system. Trained in London, in the progressive British infant schools in the late ’60s, he has received major grants from the American and Canadian governments for his work.
Bernstein also has extensive involvement in the performing arts. Trained by Viola Spolin (Improvisation for the Theater), he has created and produced original films and plays with psychiatric patients in Australia and the US. As a result, he was invited to be a resource artist for writers at The Sundance Institute . He has directed theater at the Juilliard School and the National Academy for Dramatic Art in Sydney. An award-winning composer and a Master Coach at the San Francisco Opera, Bernstein is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Singer’s Gym, a non-profit training workshop for professional singers to have vitality, spontaneity and connection in their work.
His publications include four books on how stress affects performance: Test Success (2009), Crush Your Test Anxiety (2018); A Teen’s Guide to Success (2014); and Stressed Out! for Parents (2015). His forthcoming book, Superior Test Performance in 8 Lessons, will be released in India in 2021. Dr. Bernstein can be reached via his website: DrBYourBest.com.
Charles Marmar, MD is Lucius N. Littauer Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, and Director of the NYU Langone Center for Precision Medicine in Alcohol Use Disorder and PTSD.Dr. Marmar’s major research interests are Posttraumatic stress disorder, peritraumatic dissociation, peritraumatic distress, Vietnam Veterans, police officers, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, risk factors, MRI, MRS, fMRI, acoustic startle, cortisol, HPA axis, catecholamines, neurogenetics, polysomnography, pharmacotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy, ethnicity, bereavement, and death notification. He has conducted epidemiological, biomarkers, and treatment studies including clinical trials of pharmacological treatments for PTSD and studied MRI, fMRI, and MRS markers for dual diagnosis of AUD and PTSD. His research has led to breakthroughs in our understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through the study of police officers, soldiers in combat, veterans, and civilians who have been exposed to sudden, usually life-threatening events.
He is currently the PI on a NIH P01 center grant (Leveraging biomarkers for personalized treatment of alcohol use disorder comorbid with PTSD); Department of Defense grant (Fort Campbell Cohort Five Year Follow-up Study); NIH R21 grant (Cannabidiol as a treatment for alcohol use disorder comorbid with posttraumatic stress disorder); as well as a foundation grant (Cannabidiol for Treating PTSD Symptoms and Neurocognitive Impairment in PTSD and PTSD Comorbid with TBI: A Placebo-controlled RCT with Neural-circuit centered Precision Medicine Prediction of Response) and has
over 200 peer reviewed publications.
Ralph Wharton is Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. His work is focused on the clinical use of psychotropic medicines alone and in conjunction with psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. His clinical research on the use of lithium carbonate in the affective psychoses was noted in the Special Sesquicentennial Issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry and was republished there as one of the best in its 150 years as a publication. He has published numerous other papers on diverse topics in psychiatry, including the use of methylphenidate, electrical stimulation of the brain, and phantom limb pain.Professor Wharton was honored as the President of the Society of Practitioners at the Columbia Medical Center and was Practitioner of the Year in 2010. He also served as President of the American College of Psychoanalysts. A named scholarship was set up in his honor at the College of Physicians & Surgeons. He is the founder and has co-directed the Reiner Center for Behavioral Medicine at Presbyterian Hospital for 30 years.
Professor Wharton is a founding member of the International Society for the study of Pain and has presented many papers on the subject, including a paper coauthored with Crawford Clark, that introduced a new pain scale. They published many studies together including one in Science on pain tolerance among the sherpas who serve as guides in Mt. Everest. Dr. Wharton is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the New York Academy of Medicine.
He served on Mayor Dinkins committee on addiction and reported on problems at Rikers Island jail in New York City and as a medical consultant for 3 years on an archeological exploration in the Crimea (Ukraine).