ALUMNI STORIES Thomas Insel (’74, Hon.’20)

Thomas Insel, MD, says that over his lifetime he’s had five different careers—and the self-described mental health entrepreneur, father, and grandfather has no intention of retiring. “I don’t even know what that means at this point,” he jokes.

His father, an ophthalmologist, believed medical school was a “basic education that everybody needed to do,” Insel says. But the future neuroscientist wasn’t sure he wanted to pursue medicine until, at 18 years old, he traveled to work in the clinics and hospitals of South Asia.

His experiences convinced him that medicine was worthwhile. “Being on the front lines, having babies die in my arms with tetanus, or seeing young people die from snakebites—looking back, it’s incredible to think about these sorts of problems for an 18-yearold,” Insel reflects. “But I came out of it feeling like this was something I wanted to be a part of. This was something really important.”

Insel originally planned to pursue tropical medicine, which he practiced during his travels. But he was drawn to mental health and neuroscience at the school. “I wanted to help people where the suffering was the greatest,” he explains. “It originally seemed to me that was in the parts of the world that were the most impoverished. Then, in medical school, I discovered the profound suffering in the world of mental illness.”

Insel’s research, conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), focused on the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin and their role in social behavior. After 15 years at NIMH, Insel left the institute for Emory University, where he founded the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. Ansel and his Emory team founded a new field of neuroscience, social neuroscience, that investigates how brain chemistry and systems affect social behavior. The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience brought together students and faculty from several universities in the area, including Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Morehouse, Spelman, and Morehouse School of Medicine, to conduct research. “That was a blast,” Insel recalls. “We had some really great faculty from all these different institutions who came together, and

Insel left the NIH to start working in Silicon Valley at Alphabet’s health company, Verily (originally Google Life Sciences). “I left the NIH partly because I thought there was so much going on in the technology industry to change the way that goods and services were getting delivered,” he says. “It felt like we needed to do something disruptive in mental health care.”

After a year, Insel left Verily to join the mental health tech startup Mindstrong as president and cofounder, and would later cofound Humanest, an online mental health community and resource for college students. Tech, Insel says, has the potential to bring objective diagnostics into the often-subjective world of therapy. “We tend to base our diagnostics and treatments on measurements. We measure blood pressure. We measure blood sugar. We measure a whole range of factors that let us know whether someone’s getting better or not.

“But in mental health care, there’s nothing objective. I kept wondering whether we could use objective measures because we have all these new technologies that are so good at capturing how we think, feel, and behave. Sometimes they know more about us than we know about ourselves.” we had students going back and forth. Our paths never would have crossed if not for this shared interest.”

After eight years in research at Emory, Insel turned to mental health policy. He returned to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—but this time as director of the NIMH. He notes that mental health had often been ignored in public policy settings, and that raising awareness was key: “Mental illness is often grossly misunderstood, and either neglected, or worse than neglected, people with mental illness are actually inappropriately channeled into the criminal justice system or into homelessness and poverty. So, it’s really important for people to understand mental illness.”

Humanest, which is tailored to digitally savvy 20-somethings, has seen improved engagement with mental health resources, and was preferred to traditional one-onone care.

Insel’s newest career is journalism. Last year, he co-founded MindSite News, an online news organization dedicated to mental health coverage. He is also a book author and has published Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, which investigates solutions to mental health infrastructure around the world. “I’ve always been so excited about science,” he says. “Now I’m excited about issues of service and how we can do better for people with mental illness.” ●