Taking Care of People Posted on December 3, 2007 A year of residency training with Carl Bell at a Chicago clinic inspired Ihsan M. Salloum (bio) to pursue his dual interest in research and patient care.

What really interested me was doing my clinical work in the residency training, especially during my last year. I had interest in research from the beginning, but during the last year I worked at the community mental health clinic, and that was in South Chicago, Illinois. It was called Community Mental Health Council.

It was very, very nicely organized, directed. And the director of that community is still to this day, Carl Bell, renowned psychiatrist in the country. So he was very nice role model about taking care of patient.

And he really stimulated my interest in doing some research for people who had — my main interest in research was in substance use and comorbidity, and at that time they had a group of patients who had head injury and some substance use, psychiatry problems. And there was a clinical problem, which is compliance with treatment or adherence to treatment.

And so my interest developed around studying that population, how all of these problems that they had, between head injury and other psychiatric problems, affected their adherence to treatment. So I found a very supportive environment, an inspiring mentor, and a very good staff to work with, very nice environment, and that’s how my interest in research started.

And then after residency, I started really looking seriously at some first-rate academic centers to try to help my research career, as well as my clinical work. So I interviewed in many places including WPIC. And here I think what they had to offer was a fellowship in alcohol research in addition to a degree in public health. So that was very appealing to have, one, the training and research to study formally some research application in public health, and at the same time to do my psychiatry work. And that’s really how my career more or less started.

So I did research training. It was in NIAAA, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a funded fellowship award, and so I joined that program, started at the university, and in the meantime get to know the clinical services here.

And then I started to work as a clinical faculty at the service where we had a small dual diagnosis team within an inpatient unit, and really all my research question came from taking care of patients. So this theme of taking care of people who had mood disorder and addiction. So they had either bipolar or depression, and this really was my main interest.

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