Mind & Life Podcast

Zev Schuman-Olivier – Mindfulness, Behavior Change, and Health

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September 19, 2024

View or download a transcript of this episode

In this episode, Wendy speaks with psychiatrist and contemplative researcher Zev Schuman-Olivier. Zev has been working for more than a decade to integrate mindfulness and compassion into health care, with a focus on addiction, depression, and chronic illness. This conversation covers many topics, including:

Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD
  • weaving mindfulness and compassion into clinical settings;
  • lessons from his own experience of chronic illness;
  • the key role of behavior change in health;
  • balancing individual responsibility for health with systemic factors;
  • mindfulness and addiction;
  • making interventions trauma-informed, inclusive, and broadly accessible programs;
  • how signals from the body help motivate action and emotion;
  • how mindfulness enhances trust in the body and changes the brain in depression;
  • Internal Family Systems and the critical role of acceptance;
  • and next steps for integrating mindfulness and compassion into complex healthcare systems.

Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD, is the Founding Director of the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, Director of the Mindful Mental Health Service, and Director of Addiction Research at Cambridge Health Allicance. Zev is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth. As a board-certified addiction psychiatrist, he has been involved with research and clinical care of patients with addiction, mental illness, and chronic pain both in mental health and primary care settings. He has participated in the NIH Science of Behavior Change Initiative and NIH HEAL Initiatives. He is the principal investigator for the PARTS study, which is developing and testing novel group interventions based on an Internal Family Systems approach to trauma and PTSD. He co-developed the Mindful Behavior Change curriculum and was the principal investigator of the MINDFUL-PC project, which led the way in integrating mindfulness into primary care. He is the principal investigator of the MINDFUL-OBOT trial, a national trial of live online mindfulness training groups, which recruited people with opioid use disorder from 16 states. He is also Director of the Clinical Core for the NCCIH program project grant, testing synergistic integrative mind-body approaches to chronic pain treatment. In addition, he is involved in clinical trials of innovative interventions for depression, anxiety, alcohol use, and grief.

Resources

Faculty page at Harvard Medical School
Center for Mindfulness and Compassion
Professional / Teacher Trainings