Mount Sinai has released episode seven of the monthly podcast series, Road To Resilience, which details how active coping skills can help you recover from losing a loved one. In this podcast, Rosalind J. Wright, MD, Dean of Translational Biomedical Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, explains how she used this resilience factor to cope with the murder of her brother and how that would shape her renowned career.
“It’s been a fascinating career path that I would have never had the courage to take had it not been for this incredible loss. Often times as I’m working, I’ll light a candle so he’s right here next to me because it’s his career just as much as it is mine,” Dr. Wright says. She hopes that sharing her story will help others cope with the death of a family member or close friend. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Your life is going to be changed forever, but try to find ways it will be positively changed. The more you can do that and live for the positive and seek the positive in tragedies like that, it’s amazing the good and growth that can come out of it.”
In the episode, Dr. Wright describes the grief she experienced when she lost her brother at the same time she was caring for her newborn daughter and finishing up her residency. She explains how his unexpected death took a toll on the mental and physical health of both her and her family. These challenges led Dr. Wright to become fascinated with how trauma can affect your physical well-being, and she wanted to learn more about this on a scientific level. She then applied active coping skills during this challenging time and made a big decision to switch gears from studying genetics to pursuing a career in public health.
“I started thinking people need to understand how grief can embed itself in the body and change how you are biologically. I wanted to know how it relates to increasing problems like hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and asthma,” Dr. Wright says.
Dr. Wright went on to conduct groundbreaking research focusing on inner-city populations and violence. She discovered living in a high-stress environment can have a direct impact on your immune system and can change your biology to the point where you’re at risk of developing chronic diseases, including asthma. Dr. Wright also researched the health consequences of poverty and stress. She found exposure to more pollution, a lack of nutritious food, and living in housing with mold and rodents can also make you more prone to these diseases. Her work can now pave the way for prevention and solutions.
“This is going to—more than anything in my career in medicine—finally have great impact on reducing the growth in chronic diseases that we’re seeing,” she says. “If we know what your past exposures have been that affect your health and understand it in a comprehensive way, we can start to understand what factors can push you back on a health track. As a clinician this is so exciting, and I hope this will translate into improved health for the next generations.”
The “Road to Resilience” podcast is based on the well-received book Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, co-authored by Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Steven Southwick, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University. It features thought-provoking insight from renowned experts as they explain the science behind resilience. The work has been so well received the book now has a second edition.
The book identifies 10 resilience factors to help anyone become stronger when facing life’s greatest challenges and they explain how these can be learned at any stage of life. Each podcast episode focuses on different factors including having optimism, a support system, and role models, along with physical and brain fitness. The monthly series features insight from different Mount Sinai experts as they explain the science behind resilience while sharing their personal stories and experiences.
Road to Resilience is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play (link works best in Chrome). New episodes of the series are released on the last Wednesday of each month. You can find more information on the Icahn School of Medicine website or on the Road to Resilience website.