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The diagnosis and clinical management of various mental disorders are aided by knowing the predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating factors in a given case. Both the themed album and the full-length movie of Pink Floyd’s, The Wall, depict these factors in the course of the main character’s—"Pink’s”— mental health deterioration through music and film. In this episode, we draw from selected songs on the album and from selected scenes in the movie connecting the three factors with particular behaviors Pink manifests. In the process, we show how they are used in medical education and training in real time.

Joining us is Dr. Anthony Tobia, who is the campus chair in the Department of Psychiatry at the Rutgers School of Medicine and is also the Service Chief of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health in New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Tobia is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is certified in internal medicine and psychosomatic medicine. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Rutgers. Dr. Tobia is the Director of Graduate and Interprofessional Education at Rutgers University Behavioral Health and has received the Outstanding Clinical Faculty Member Excellence Award in 2018 and 2019. He is an active contributor to the medical literature with publications, reviews, and abstracts. Dr. Tobia’s educational interests include the merging of popular culture and the field of behavioral medicine, which is evident from this episode and from his previous appearance on the podcast episode featuring The Who’s Tommy. Along with Dr. Tobia for this episode is Kevin Frederiks, who at the time of recording, was a fourth-year medical student at Rutgers.

Citations

For the recorded album: Pink Floyd. The Wall. Columbia Records, 1979.

For the movie: Parker, Alan, director. Pink Floyd The Wall. MGM, 1982.

Link

The movie, The Wall, is available on YouTube here.

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: russell.teagarden@gmail.com.

Thanks to Dr. Anthony Tobia and (by now) Dr. Kevin Fredriks for their interesting and insightful contributions to this episode.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

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The Clinic & Person podcast returns, and this short episode recounts the reasons for its return and what can be expected.

The general objectives of the podcast remain the same in that we will still draw from certain works such as literature, art, film, music, etc., but source content will also come from certain ideas or disciplines such as philosophy, ethics, sociology, economics, history, and the like. We talk briefly about episodes we have in the works, which derive from these and various other content sources

For the list of our previous 30 episodes, see The Clinic & The Person website. You can listen to them from that site or from many established podcast providers. They can also be accessed at medhum.org, where there is also a curated forum of reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces on the types of subject this podcast considers in addition to many more.

Get in touch

We would love to hear from you with any suggestions, comments, or questions. You can use the “Send us Fan Mail” link above, or to russell.teagarden@gmail.com

We hope you will join us again for new episodes, follow us where you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and colleagues about us. Our next episode will be posted soon.

Episode image: One Open Window, Chris Downer (source: Wikicommons)

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We end the podcast after thirty episodes over three years. In this brief, last episode, we announce the end of this series, explain our reasons for ending it now, summarize what we covered over the thirty episodes, and express our appreciation for our listeners and the guests who came on the podcast. We also reveal what is next for us, which will involve similar interests but we will expand our sources beyond humanities in a narrow sense to encompass broader ideas relevant to health and biomedicine, such as philosophy, ethics, sociology, history, and religion, among others. While we will continue to produce audio programming, we will also produce written works such as essays, reviews, critiques, and reflections. Most of this work will be available through MedHum.org.

MedHum.org is an independent, online, multidisciplinary, and multimedia collaborative for identifying and generating critical thinking in health, culture, and the arts. It began in early 2024 following the discontinuation of the NYU Literature, Art and Medicine Database (LitMed), which had been a respected and consulted source around the world for perspectives on health and biomedicine drawn from the humanities. MedHum.org builds on the LitMed model and expands on the content sources and media used for its work. Look for us there, and subscribe to the MedHum.org newsletter for announcements of new contributions.

Links

• The Clinic & The Person website listing all episodes
• Russell Teagarden’s blog post with summary of each podcast episode
• MedHum.org site
• MedHum.org newsletter

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to russell.teagarden@gmail.com

Thanks to all the listeners and to all our guests.

Image credit: Oscar Maugsch (1857–?) (architect); Beautiful Buildings Pics (photo), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons