This is Democracy – Episode 18: Health Care Policy and American Democracy

What have we learned about health care policy? What are reform pathways forward?

Dr. Suri discusses with Dr. Stephen Sonnenberg how a healthy society makes for a healthy democracy.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Dear Doctor."

Stephen Sonnenberg has served as clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Howard University College of Medicine, adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine and clinical professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. He is currently adjunct professor of psychiatry at The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where he served as clinical professor before moving to Texas.

At The University of Texas at Austin, he is professor of psychiatry, population health, and medical education at Dell Medical School, adjunct professor in the School of Architecture, Fellow of the Trice Professorship in the Plan II Honors Program, and principal investigator of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Patients, Practitioners, and Cultures of Care Project, a research and development effort to create a new undergraduate Bridging Disciplines Program emphasizing the relationship of health care and the humanities. His most important committee assignments at UT Austin include the Rhodes, Marshall and Truman Scholarships Selection Committee and the chairmanship of the Hamilton Book Awards Selection Committee in 2017.

Sonnenberg serves on numerous editorial boards and peer review panels of leading journals in the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He has contributed scholarly articles to the leading journals in those fields, is the co-author of the textbook “Psychodynamic Psychotherapy” (American Psychiatric Press, 1991, 1998, 2004), which has been translated into Russian, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Persian, and Japanese, and he is the co-author of chapters in important textbooks of psychiatry. He is the co-editor of “The Trauma of War: Stress and Recovery in Viet Nam Veterans” (American Psychiatric Press, 1985). Early in 2013 the award-winning book “CENTER 17: Space & Psyche,” which he co-edited, was published by the Center for American Architecture and Design, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin.

His research interests focus on the points of intersection of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, medical education, population health and other areas of scholarly inquiry. His subjects of study include war and violence; architecture in relation to health care; psychic trauma and PTSD; addiction and its treatment; education and effective teaching methods; medical humanities, ethics and the doctor-patient relationship; and health and human rights. In the past he has served as co-principal investigator of the Psychology of Deterrence Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; director of research of the Project on the Vietnam Generation at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution; and research scholar at the Center for Psychology and Social Change, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School at Cambridge Hospital.