PsychEd Book Club 2: Healing with Dr. Thomas Insel

PsychEd Book Club 2: Healing with Dr. Thomas Insel

From PsychEd: Educational Psychiatry Podcast by PsychEd

February 28, 2026 · 52 min

About this episode

The episode features a discussion on Dr. Thomas Insel's book 'Healing' and its implications for mental health and psychiatry.

Welcome to PsychEd, the psychiatry podcast for medical learners, by medical learners. This is our second book club episode centered around the novel Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health by Thomas Insel, MD. This book is a part memoir / part manifesto written by one of our generation’s most important leaders in neuroscience and psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Insel. Dr. Insel served as the director of the NIMH for 13 years from 2002-2015. Healing is replete with his reflections on personal and clinical experiences as well as epidemiological data, research, and policies related to mental health. Dr. Insel argues that medicine’s failure to significantly reduce the mortality and morbidity of psychiatric illnesses is less due to a lack of scientific progress, and more a result of poor implementation of existing interventions that are already well supported by the evidence. Guest: Dr. Thomas Insel Hosts: Dr. Gaurav Sharma - Staff psychiatrist working in Nunavut, Canada Dr. Kate Braithwaite - Family doctor from South Africa Ahmad Khan - MS4 at Western University Dr. Sophie Gregoire-Mitha - PGY1 Psychiatry resident in Manitoba Audio editing: Dr. Gaurav Sharma Episode Evaluation…

People in this episode

Hosts: Dr. Gaurav Sharma, Dr. Kate Braithwaite, Ahmad Khan, Dr. Sophie Gregoire-Mitha

Guest: Dr. Thomas Insel

Topics covered

  • mental health
  • psychiatry
  • neuroscience
  • clinical application
  • book discussion
  • personal experiences

Keywords

  • mental illness
  • psychiatry podcast
  • Thomas Insel
  • clinical strategies
  • mental health policies
  • neuroscience

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NIMH

Books & works: Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

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