UI&U Professor Travels To Australia to Assist Aboriginal Cooperative

Mehl-Madrona works to bring indigenous concepts of health and healing into the contemporary practice of medicine and psychology

Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona

CINCINNATI - Native American physician and psychologist Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who serves as faculty for Union Institute & University’s Doctorate in Psychology program, will travel to Australia for two weeks in March as part of a grant through the Gippsland and East Gippsland Aboriginal Cooperative and the Australian government. Mehl-Madrona will assist an aboriginal cooperative to explore how to incorporate their own culture into the health care they receive.


Accompanying Mehl-Madrona will be Dr. Robert Crocker, a Choctaw Family Physician who serves as an associate professor at the University of Arizona, and Barbara Mainguy, a creative arts therapist and art consultant from Concordia University in Montreal. Together, the three will explore and share stories about each other’s cultures with members of the aboriginal cooperative as a way to explore diversity and cultural exchange. This is Mehl-Madrona’s third year working with the Gippsland and East Gippsland Aboriginal Cooperative. He is funded for two more annual visits.

Throughout his career, Mehl-Madrona has worked to bring indigenous concepts of health and healing into the contemporary practice of medicine and psychology. He has found the narrative paradigm and social constructionism to be most exciting ways to bridge indigenous people and contemporary psychology. He is the author of five books in these areas, the most recent of which is Healing the Mind through the Power of Story: the Promise of Narrative Psychiatry. His article “Benzos to Berries,” was published this week in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.

Mehl-Madrona received his M.D. degree from Stanford University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Psychological Studies Institute in Palo Alto, California, in 1980. He has a postgraduate diploma in narrative studies from Massey University in New Zealand and completed residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont. He completed post-doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley in alcohol research and at the Center for Recovery from Illness in neuropsychology. Mehl-Madrona is American Board Certified in Family Medicine with added qualifications in geriatrics and in psychiatry.

At UI&U, he teaches courses related to research methods, biological aspects of psychology, and narrative studies. He is especially interested in the brain as a social organ, its social construction, and the role of epigenetics and neuroplasticity in regulating mood and behavior.

For more information about Dr. Mehl-Madrona’s work to or to schedule an interview, please contact Nicole Hamilton, public relations manager, at 513-487-1194 or at Nicole.hamilton@myunion.edu.