Week Five

My fifth week in New York City with Mount Sinai Hospital has been great. I am very excited by all of the experiences that I have had the opportunity to be a part of and to learn from. I began my week with the lab coordinator in the Food Allergy Clinic, learning how to present our psychiatric screening to patients and their families. Only recently has mental health research specifically examined the food allergy population. Though the findings are limited, high levels of anxiety and poor quality of life have been confirmed to be rather common in the food-allergic population. Dr. Shemesh is a leader in this new direction of mental health research and has created the EMPOWER program at Mount Sinai, a program that screens for anxiety disorders and ultimately promotes mental health among this population. In doing so, he and his team have created a short, validated questionnaire for both the parent and child that is administered during regular outpatient visits. Mount Sinai is fortunate to have extra funding to support Dr. Shemesh in this program and allow him to provide free consultations for families who indicate higher levels of anxiety. Thus, I spent Monday explaining our program to families in the clinic and analyzing their questionnaire results. It was great to see that many families are appreciative of this free service for the empathy and understanding of the emotional burden that food allergies present. If families score above the threshold for certain parts of the questionnaire, they are recommended to meet with Dr. Shemesh for a free consultation about new ways to cope and manage the distress. He also sees families that are referred to him from other mental health specialists or allergists. Most of his consultations require the family to create an active plan to challenge pre-established avoidance mechanisms or to change their mental paradigm about the allergy. 

This week I also shadowed a developmental pediatrician, Dr. Farrell, who collaborates with Dr. Shemesh. I observed a new patient evaluation with her. This meeting was actually just with the parents of the patient to establish a comprehensive developmental history before actually seeing the patient the following week. This family was from Ecuador, so their English was okay, but they struggled to understand some phrases. I was surprised to see that the office did not have forms in Spanish. After many years of Spanish and several experiences living abroad, I offered to translate these forms to Spanish for the large Hispanic population in the city. I didn’t, however, realize how lengthy these documents were, but I will make it my next project. I followed Dr. Farrell to the Seaver Autism Clinic as well this week to see a three-year-old girl who has been thought to have autism. Because the visit was supposed to be again an opportunity to collect a comprehensive developmental history, the three-year-old needed a playmate for the hour and a half. I got down on my hands and knees in my dress and heels and played blocks and colored with her. This experience was pivotal in my internship and made me realize how important working with children is to me. From this, I have begun to look into Clinical Psychology PhD programs that have a child track and thereby offer specific child training.

I concluded my week in a research meeting with Dr. Shemesh to establish ideas for my research with him. I am very excited to work with him because he is a truly phenomenal mentor who seeks to nourish ideas rather than shoot them down. He takes my energy and helps me focus it. I look forward to the data analysis that will come soon as well as the abstract (and hopefully) the publication!! 

Black Building: Annenberg, where I spend most of my time