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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.

• Article: Neither Deaths From Denial Nor Deaths From Despair
• Article: Prevention of Covert COVID Iatrogenesis
• Presentation: Weaving Beauty Into the Tapestry of the Pandemic

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.

• Article: Triage Trauma and Moral Distress
• Article: A Pandemic of False Choices

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

• Article: Resilience, Not Panic, in a Time of Pandemic in Psychiatric Times, March 3, 2020. We can reasonably quarantine infected individuals, but we should not squander our social and moral capital by quarantining whole communities.
• Presentation: Covid Iatrogenesis. Webinar for the Department of Education UNESCO Chair in Bioethics Webinar, May 1, 2020.
• Interview: 'It Just Broke Me': Health Workers Struggle For Time To Grieve Patients Lost To COVID-19. Dr. Bursztajn is quoted from an interview for WBUR for this article from May 11, 2020 examining grief in a time of pandemic.

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.

• Article: Ethics and the triage model in managed care hospital psychiatry
• Article: How catastrophe can change personality: Why EPCACE is a clinically useful diagnosis in Psychiatric Times, September 2019. EPCACE as a non-stigmatizing diagnosis to help understand, share and bear catastrophic experiences.
• Correspondence:Preserve Enduring Personality Change After Catastrophic Experience (EPCACE) as a diagnostic resource in Lancet Psychiatry, May, 2018.
• Article: Why did so many German doctors join the Nazi Party early?

• Article: Why Are Young Westerners Drawn to Terrorist Organizations Like ISIS? This article reflects one of Dr. Bursztajn's special interests in clinical, ethical and forensic psychiatric issues regarding adolescent growth and development. Dr Bursztajn regularly consults to families and school on adolescent related issues. This article was also featured in the Brown Daily Herald of Brown College: Paper details Western ISIS recruits' motives.

Lodz and the Shoah

• Exhibition and Presentation: Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross. The work of Ross and the Fekalists each served as resistance to the planned demoralization and destruction of what was before World War II a vibrant multicultural community. Dr. Bursztajn's contributions to the exhibition include a Gallery talk: Trauma, Resilience, Resistance, Photography, and the Memory of the Shoah.
• Presentation: Physician know thyself to help and heal: From the (1939-1945) Shoah's times of catastrophe and great moral hazard to today's (2015) ethical challenges to clinicians. Dr. Bursztajn presents how physicians and other health care workers do their best in times of great moral hazard, community catastrophe, and faced with tragic choices and decision making under conditions of unvertainty using an awareness of one's own autobiography, including remebering one's own original motivations for the practice of medicine. Presented by the Flexner Dean's Lecture Series at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine on Monday, March 9, 2015.
• Article: Love in the Shadow of the Third Reich. An introduction by Susan Kweskin that appeared in the print edition of the Psychiatric Times to the online-only article Revisiting Lodz, Poland in 2011 and Reconstructing How My Parents Survived the Shoah (1939-1945).
• Article: Lessons from a WWII ghetto resonate with doctors today. The Boston Globe features a story on Dr. Bursztajn's teaching activities at Harvard medical School relative to learning from his parent's experiences with doctors during the Shoah. This article was inspired by a recent Surgical Grand Rounds, "Health Care in the Lodz Ghetto: Care, Compliance, Conscience and Resistance" that Dr. Bursztajn presented at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on July 8, 2009. More recently, the story has been picked up by the Los Angeles Times.
• The Shoah and its Aftermath: the testimony of Dr. Bursztajn's father, a Holocaust survivor.
  • Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin issue from Autumn 2006 titled "Sparks of Inspiration" includes the article "Prescriptions for Hope". Lessons from the Holocaust in how doctors can heal through hope, an adaptation of Dr. Bursztajn's original article above.
  • For more information on Jewish Lodz, please visit the Lodz ShtetLinks home page.
• A photograph of Dr. Bursztajn's mother who was part of the Lodz resistance in 1944.
• Stories and recollections of fragments of Doctor Salomea Kape's life with the shadow of the holocaust behind it:
  • The Unforgotten, first place in the Literature: short story category in the 2003 American Society of Anesthesiologists 35th Annual Art Exhibit "Fountain of Youths." This is a powerful story about the complications of forgiveness.
  • On the Autopsy Table in Lodz...Biebow from Bremen, a Memoir by Salomea Kape published in the Summer 1993 issue of Lilith, The Independent Jewish Women's Magazine, Volume 18, No. 3.
  • "Searching for Daniel," also by Dr. Kape was published on page 10 of the September 2007 (PDF) issue of Together as well as Dr. Bursztajn's Letter to Editor regarding this article.
  • Photo and short biography of Dr. Daniel Weiskopf, featured in the memoir above.
  • Daniel Weiskopf's entry in Marek Szukalak's book on Jewish Lodz (also in the original Polish).
  • Hunger, appeared in JAMA, September 23/30, 1988, Volume 260.
  • Fatal Freedom, a short story.
• From one of Dr. Bursztajn's medical school classmates, another way to remember the past:

  I was on a cruise of the western Mediterranean last month, followed by a few days in the south of France. I spent them with a teacher who guided her elementary pupils through a project to document the life and times of two Jewish girls, aged 3 and 8, who lived in the town of (then) 300 before being taken to Sobibor. A pupil proposed renaming the school "Lea and Elizabeth Schnitzler"; this was done. Their work won a French national award for teaching the Holocaust. When the award was about to be given at the Sorbonne nearly two years ago, a French Jewish organization looked to see if there were any surviving relatives of the girls. Through a convoluted set of Internet connections, they got in touch with me. Those girls were my third cousins! When I visited France, I met the girls' former playmates, now septuagenarians. Here is a journalist's account of my visit to the school. Later I saw a displaced persons' camp (Rivesaltes) near Perpignan, a maternity home for those from the camp, some marvelous churches, and (just before the teacher and her husband drove me across the Spanish frontier) the town where the girls were arrested.

• "Psychic Numbing and Genocide," the lead article in the November 15, 2007 issue of the American Psychological Association's Psychological Science Agenda.
• Article: Holocaust Survivors at Higher Risk for All Cancers. Jewish survivors of World War II who were potentially exposed to the Holocaust are at a higher risk for cancer occurrence, according to a new study published online October 26 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
• Interview: History's Most Prolific Executioner. Dr. Bursztajn is interviewed in this article about Vasili Blohkin, a Soviet major-general who murdered 10,000 people during Stalin's purges and World War II.

Poetry

• AGING or Twisting Your Life Away by Andre Churchwell, MD, FACC
• Recognition and Uncle Hymen by Howard Stein, PhD

Cultural Highlights

• Article: Musician Plays Violin as Surgeons Operate on His Brain.

Psychoanalysis

• Article: The Museum Show Has an Ego Disorder. Dr. Bursztajn's letter to the New York Time Magazine regarding a museum exhibition about psychoanalysis.
• Article: Learning to Do Psychotherapy With Psychotic Patients. In remembrance: Elvin Semrad, MD (1909-1976).

Neuropsychiatry

• Book Review: Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience.

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