Videos & Podcasts

About the Department

An introduction to the department

Stanford University's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences works to create a better future not only for people with mental illness but all of society by bringing together and fulfilling five missions. These missions include providing clinical services to patients in the most effective way possible, conducting scientific research that advances the clinical and population-based science, providing education and training for diverse professional disciplines, engaging and committing to local communities, and preparing the next generation of leaders. 2012

Stanford Psychiatry Residency Program

Hear the perspectives of the leadership and residents of Stanford's Psychiatry Residency Program.

Eating Disorders Program

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford Medicine is a center of excellence in clinical care, translational research, and training in eating disorders across the age and diagnostic spectrum. We endeavor to understand the brain basis of these disorders through studies of neurocognition, functional and anatomical brain imaging, and family risk factors. We aim to engage patients, families, health providers, and researchers in the larger community through education.

Featuring Individual Faculty

From Loss to a Legacy of Hope

Despite the best efforts of her father and friends, Esther Ting died of a drug overdose just short of her 19th birthday. George Ting, MD, shares his journey from loss to healing in this moving short film and explains why he chose to establish the Esther Ting Memorial Professorship in addiction medicine at Stanford.  Find out more about this story on Scope Blog.

Dr. Leanne Williams describes how philanthropy will help us improve the lives of those who suffer from mental health disorders by applying fresh insights about the human brain to real-world clinical care.

Find out more about the event and the Campaign for Stanford Medicine here!

Dr. Amit Etkin explains how philanthropy will help us master a new level of knowledge about the brain to create individually tailored treatments for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and head trauma.

Find out more about the event and the Campaign for Stanford Medicine here!

Nadia Haddad, MD, MS on a Practical, Holistic Approach to Stress & Wellness in a High Pressure World

Modern working life is stressful. Although most people know what stress feels like, and many experience it daily, it is often assumed to be “in our head” and best just pushed through. On the contrary, stress is physiologic and psychologic pressure that disturbs our body’s equilibrium. Dr. Haddad discusses practical approaches to reducing stress through subtle lifestyle changes and non-pharmacologic interventions like acupuncture and nutrition.

PBS NewsHour with Victor Carrion, MD

Mindfulness can be a powerful tool in treating post-traumatic stress disorder in teens. In this PBS NewsHour segment, Victor Carrion, MD, explains how.

Being Human  |  Amit Etkin

AZT and Prozac were invented in the same year. While patients with HIV have seen good health outcomes, those with mental illness have not been getting better. That’s according to Dr. Amit Etkin, assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. In this video for the World Economic Forum, Etkin explains why he thinks mental illness is not caused by chemical imbalance, but by faulty neural circuits. He’s been pioneering a non-invasive way to stimulate broken wires in the brain.

Hypnosis and Hypnotizability

In this clip (3 of 9), Dr. David Spiegel defines hypnosis and introduces the trait of hypnotizability.  This clip is part of the lecture “Tranceformation: Hypnosis in Brain and Body,” by David Spiegel, M.D., Willson Professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.  This lecture, given at the NIH in March 2015 as part of NCCIH’s Integrative Medicine Research Lecture Series, is included in NCCIH’s Online Continuing Education Series.

Diagnosing and Treating Anxiety and Depression in Mid to Late Life

Depression and anxiety are two of the most common psychiatric problems among older adults and frequently co-occur. Additionally they may be related to the cognitive functioning of an individual. Learn about the general traits of anxiety and depression, their relationship to cognition, and how they are treated in the older adult.  Speaker: Ruth O'Hara, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Director, National Fellowship Program in Advanced Psychiatry and Psychology Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine

Understanding Bipolar Depression

This talk provides a broad overview of bipolar depression in adults, with respect to diagnostic challenges and current treatment strategies for this condition. Speaker: Shefali Miller, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University Medical Center

Stanford Health Policy Forum: The Problem of Prescription Opioids

Prescription opioids provide much needed relief to people in acute pain, but are also widely misused, leading to addiction and over one thousand overdose deaths per month. As the annual number of prescriptions has soared to over 200 million, policymakers have been struggling with how to limit the risks of these medications while at the same time keeping them available for people in pain. In this Stanford Health Policy Forum, addiction medicine expert Anna Lembke, M.D. and pain medicine expert Sean Mackey, M.D., Ph.D., debate and discuss how to balance the benefits and costs of prescription opioids.

Applying neuro-scientific findings to enduring social problems | Keith Humphreys

Our brains have evolved to be vulnerable to addiction – especially if we live in the lower tiers of society. Keith Humphreys, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University, explains how an understanding of our evolutionary vulnerability to psychoactive substances can help us to design effective public policies.

Mental Health Improvements Through Early Detection and Intervention

In this video, Dr. Steven Adelsheim discusses improving mental health through early detection and treatment of mental illness in youth.

Decoding Personal Relevance with Neuroscience

From the #mediaX2015 Conference “Writing the Code for Personal Relevance”; Allan Reiss, Howard C. Robbins Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Radiology, Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences (CIBSR) at Stanford University, discusses being at a fascinating inflection point in our understanding of human brain function and dysfunction. In the first part of this talk, Allan describes his research designed to improve understanding of communicative and social complexities in human social interaction with the goal of providing a more complete and nuanced background for understanding human-human interaction. In the second part of the talk he briefly describes technology-enhanced advances in personalized brain medicine that hold promise for revolutionizing the approach to common (and often devastating) brain disorders such as autism, learning disabilities and dementia.

Understanding Adult and Pediatric Eating Disorders

Eating disorders cut across socioeconomic lines and affect people at all stages of life. This talk focuses on how eating disorders are diagnosed, their prevalence, and current treatments.

Speaker: Debra L. Safer, MD
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, SUMC

Feeling, thinking, and creativity in bipolar disorder: Terence Ketter at TEDxConstitutionDrive

Since 1995, Dr. Terence Ketter has been at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he is Professor, and founder and Chief of the Bipolar Disorder Clinic. Dr. Ketter's research, has involved studying bipolar disorder's causes, symptoms, and treatments, and has included exploring links between creativity, temperament, and mood disorders. He has published extensively on bipolar disorder, including over 350 scientific articles and book chapters, and is editor of the American Psychiatric Publishing volumes "Advances in the Treatment of Bipolar Disorder" and "Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of Bipolar Disorder". He serves on editorial boards for numerous scientific journals. Dr. Ketter continues to care for patients with bipolar disorder, for which he has been awarded the Outstanding Faculty Physician Award by Vaden Health Center at Stanford University.

Mindscape: Laura Roberts, MD, MA, on Improving the Health & Wellbeing of Medical Residents

Chief of Staff John M. Oldham, MD, MS, discusses the challenges that medical residents face in managing their own mental health and wellbeing with Dr. Roberts, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Manuela Kogon, MD on how fear of living with uncertainty doesn't have to take over your life

Fear of Recurrence and Late Effects: Living with Uncertainty
Part of the Ernest Rosenbaum Cancer Survivorship Lecture Series

Learn how to not let the fear of cancer recurrence take over your life.  Speaker: Manuela Kogon, MD, PhD, Clinical Associate Professor, Psychiatry & Behavioral Science - Psychosocial, SUMC

Mindscape: The Complexities of Mental Health Medications

Alan Schatzberg, MD, of Stanford University Medical School, discusses psychotropic meds with John M. Oldham, MD, MS, former chief of staff at The Menninger Clinic.

Molecular mechanisms of reward and aversion | Robert Malenka

The brain circuitry that determines whether we find a stimulus rewarding or aversive is complicated. Robert Malenka, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University, explains what we need to know to be able to treat disorders such as addiction and depression, and help people to make healthy, constructive decisions.

Alexander Eckehart Urban, Ph.D., Stanford University

Alex Urban, PhD - Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Genetics. Inaugural Meeting of the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Center (2/27/14).  Dr. Urban’s research focuses on developing genomics analysis tools to study sequence variation in brain development and function. He explained his research in the genomic characterization of a panel of iPSC lines in 22q11 Deletion Syndrome to a better understand of the molecular etiology of this disorder.

Podcasts