Centers

Established in November 1997, the Center for the Psychosocial Study of Health and Illness is a multidisciplinary research group located within the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Researchers at the Center have focused primarily on the psychological, social, and practical issues surrounding adaptation to illness and surviving illness.   

Directed by Drs. Karolynn Siegel and Victoria H. Raveis, the Center’s multidisciplinary research group  has included sociologists, health psychologists, health educators, social workers and nurses. The Center’s work addresses  adaptive tasks facing individuals with chronic and life-threatening disease, coping strategies they adopt in an effort to master these tasks, and their health behavior. The families and informal caregivers of chronically or terminally ill patients have also been a major research focus of the Center.

Funding

The investigators’ work is funded primarily through diverse National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes including, NCI, NIMH, NINR, NICHD, NIDCR, NIDA, NIA, and AHCPR, as well as the Health and Human Services Research Administration, the American Cancer Society, the Department of Defense, New York State and several philanthropic foundations. 

Mission

The mission of the Center for the Psychosocial Study of Health and Illness is to investigate the psychological, social and practical issues impacting patients and their caregivers as they relate to:  (1) adaptation to illness, (2) surviving illness, or (3) being at risk for disease.