Rethinking Psychiatric Medication Withdrawal
With Professor Elizabeth Murnane, under PhD Candidate Shirin Amouei, Thayer School of Engineering, Empower Lab
Sayles Student Research Grant
December 2023 - March 2024
Abstract:
Overprescription, especially in psychiatric care, is a significant issue. Studies indicate that approximately 20% of prescription medications are considered medically “unnecessary” by physicians themselves (Lyu et al., 2017). Patients can experience severe and prolonged symptoms when trying to stop medications (i.e., withdrawal symptoms). However, they rarely find support during this process and are often dismissed in clinical practice. As a result, they seek and find help in online health communities (OHC). This term-long research project focused on the impact of protracted withdrawal on individuals who use a popular OHC (survivingantidepressants.org) to share their experiences. The post history and content of ten randomly selected users, who meet the criteria of (1) being active on the forum for a year or more and (2) have more than 20 posts, were analyzed qualitatively to pinpoint the consequences of withdrawal, resulting in a total of 433 analyzed posts/comments. Additionally, the use of generative AI as a tool for qualitative analysis in this project was explored. As a result of the analysis, ethical consequences of withdrawal are discussed in the realm of patient-clinician relationships and also the use of AI to analyze data about medical/human experiences. This work was performed with the mentorship of PhD student Shirin Amouei.
Resonance
With Professor Elizabeth Murnane, under PhD Candidate Shirin Amouei, Thayer School of Engineering, Empower Lab
URAD (Undergraduate Research Assistantship at Dartmouth) & Luce Scholar Fellowship
March 2022 - June 2023
Abstract:
The patient clinician relationship is a key area for tackling disparities in healthcare. There is an opportunity to understand, and potentially improve, patient-clinician relationships by empowering patients to candidly reflect on their interaction with their physician. The goal of this project is to provide patients with an opportunity to reflect on their experience with a physician after a medical appointment, which could promote better practices and lead to better patient-clinician communication or understanding. Our goal is to design a device that will allow patients to speak into to record their experiences/feelings of their medical treatment, and then have the device play the recording back. Design choices will be made from interview analysis and literature review. The designed artifact not only could improve relations in the clinic, but could also allow ordinary people (or friends and family) to better understand what a chronic pain patient is going through and therefore provide better support. Our main research questions therefore include: What types of thoughts/questions are/are not being vocalized by patients during the visit? What are some of the barriers for patients in candidly discussing their experience/concerns/questions? What are the underlying patterns of communication/behavior? How do these patterns correspond to different demographics?
Nature Time
With Professor Elizabeth Murnane, Thayer School of Engineering, Empower Lab
FYREE - First Year Research Experience in Engineering
April 2021 - March 2022
Abstract:
Studies have found that a person’s physical space and digital environment can influence their perception of time, which is linked to a person’s well-being. While a sense of pressured time has been linked with stress, anxiety, and physical ailments, a sense of time expansion is associated with more mindful, restorative, and healing outcomes. In particular, a large body of empirical research has demonstrated the specific physiological and psychological benefits of nature experiences and exposure to particular biotic elements, patterns, and forms (e.g., lowered blood pressure, overall longevity, reduced stress, replenished attention, and enhanced creativity and memory). Our main research questions therefore include: How do various software interfaces impact the experience of time and well-being? How can we make software interfaces more “healthy” or restorative by embedding features that expand the sense of time or by making design choices inspired by biophilia? How can we apply machine learning to examine biotic forms in order to extract previously unknown patterns and/or formulate computational representations of natural phenomena in order to inform these design decisions?