A note from Dorian Gittleman, founder:
Welcome to the GETLab, my labor of love. I suppose these days it should be called my “side hustle” but I certainly did not form it for profit.
When I went back to school in 2008, I planned to study psychology, and that’s what my bachelors is in. In undergrad, as would be expected, my interests were across the board, but I took an especial interest in research-practice gaps and community-based research. I went from there into public health, focusing further on mental illness and how we measure it and why we care about those measures. As my mentor Dr. Ben Druss shows in all of his research – mental illness doesn’t kill people. Diabetes kills people. Suicide kills people. Homelessness kills people. To make a massive understatement, the dynamic relationship between mental health, physical health, and environment is very complicated. I do not believe it is too complicated for research, but for myself, I found participating in research to be disheartening. The research gap does not narrow. The quality of the evidence for evidence based practices remains mixed. The funding for research into mental illness continues to flow towards neuroscience and away from therapy and treatment.
I took my research sensibilities into applied work and I have only occasionally looked back. For the last 6 years I have been a project manager, leading implementations, quality improvement, and evaluations for healthcare organizations. I help people doing the work to understand and utilize their data to try and make tangible improvements in the health of the people for whom they are responsible.
So with all that said, why the GETLab? Because the pieces were there. It started with my partner. For full disclosure, I am domestically partnered with another member of the GETLab, Gareth Edel. He and I are both passionate about medicine, but he is more of the armchair philosopher school. We come at medicine from completely opposite ends, and it took us years to build a common language, to stop disagreeing about the words we used to describe something and to actually disagree about the topic under discussion. Of course our best arguments have always happened in the presence of colleagues, who keep us from digging in our heels on a position or rehashing familiar lines of discourse.
The more we spoke with Erin and Kate, the more I could see the overlaps and the opportunities for us as a team. Each person brings particular strengths, and has particular needs that the GET can meet. We are a support for each other, and that will continue to be my most important role as the GET expands. The contributions each of my colleagues and friends is capable of making to the fields of social science and medicine is immense. I will be there to provide their scaffolding.