Cultural Perspectives

COVID-19 Considerations

Dr. Bursztajn, who has a longstanding interest in how mental-health professionals can help people cope with the long-term consequences of trauma and grief, has been actively involved in public-health education relative to the COVID-19 crisis. This crisis has brought a sudden emergence of clinical and forensic mental-health issues in the lives of many individuals and families. All too often, panic and grief associated with life-threatening illness can result in a variety of forensic issues such as advance directives, end-of-life decision making, assessment of testamentary capacity and/or undue influence, competence to consent to treatment, guardianship, child custody, emotional injury, and disability- and ADA-related employment issues (e.g., potential liability for discrimination or wrongful termination).

Art can promote self-reflection and conversation as to what matters in life even under the most extreme circumstances.

When we choose how we spend our time in our life, continued reflection and conversation is all the more vital when any choice can be life-changing.

Grief work helps healthy resilience during loss and in its aftermath.

On the other hand when grief work is impeded by denial, individuals and communities suffer across generations. The articles below may be of interest relative to the COVID pandemic powerlessness and despair enabling the emergence of paranoid and scapegoating personality traits, as in racism and anti-Semitism, and the transgenerational transmission of group hatred in the service of denying mortality.

Lodz and the Shoah

Poetry

Cultural Highlights

Psychoanalysis

Neuropsychiatry

Dr. Bursztajn has an active patient care practice and consults to physicians, institutions, judges, and plaintiff and defense counsel nationally.