Joel Braslow

Joel Braslow is a psychiatrist and medical historian. He was a faculty member at UCLA from 1996 until 2023 before moving to the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

His research explores the social, cultural, historical, policy, and scientific contexts of mental health policy and treatment practices for serious mental illness. He has probed the various ways in which sociocultural, scientific, and institutional contexts have played themselves out in the care and treatment of patients with serious mental illness. He is currently working on a “clinical” history of nineteenth and twentieth-century American psychiatry, exploring the ways in which practicing psychiatrists made sense of, care for, treated, and, most recently, largely abandoned those with psychotic disorders. 

Joel Braslow serves as an Advisory Committee Member.