Week 1:
Carver College of Medicine

January 22, 2014

The Calarge lab is quite an operation! I am one of the sixteen who assist Dr. Chadi Calarge in his studies of the psychiatric medication of adolescents. His lab is a part of the massive University of Iowa hospital system. I had no idea it was so big! My hope as a psychology major is to one day become a neuropsychologist -a psychological specialist who deals with difficult cases of mental illness which require  interweaving biological and learned-behavioral factors to be teased apart so each can be properly treated. I signed up for this research fellowship hoping that I could get the inside perspective on real treatment of mental illness in the field.

For the first week, I needed a lot of helping finding my way through its maze of tunnels and elevators. In fact, I needed a lot of help in general, but in the culture of this lab asking for help is never chastized. Dr. Calarge has a reputation around the hospital for being extremely detail-oriented, and also having a very low tolerance for mistakes made out of ignorance. In his letter to new hires he writes, “If I ask you to do something you do not understand, please say so. If you are too scared of me, please find someone else to work for”.  In most jobs this position may be extreme, but here it pays to be honest and fastidious when researching a topic as slippery as people and their moods (especially troubled people and their troubled moods). An ethical psychiatrist cannot afford to act on unchecked assumptions when their patient’s minds are on the line.

It was intimidating asking for so much assistance (and so often too), but everybody here has been very helpful and patient in getting me up to speed with the basic day-to-day operations of the lab. Right now, I’m on the data entry squad for Dr. Calarge’s SSRI study. Basically, this involves copying handwritten forms like the Beck Depression/Anxiety Inventories into an electronic database; where at some point in the future they will be statistically analyzed. Occasionally I also will answer phones or run samples from the hospital’s Clinical Research Unit (CRU) to the freeze room here in the Calarge Lab. The aim of the study I’ve been involved with is to understand/uncover a causal relationship between the use of antidepressant SSRI-type medications (such as Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, or Lexapro) in 15-20 year old patients, and resultant changes in bone mass density. Stool and blood are also taken and stored in deep-freeze for later analysis. The Dr. hopes to become one of the first researchers to identify links between metal illness, its pharmacological treatment, and their effects on gut bacteria as influenced by genetic factors. There are close to 1,000 patient files on this topic. Each 4-inch binder represents a young adult who, upon starting an SSRI treatment, submitted themselves to a two year program of testing and questioning  by Dr. Calarge and his assistants for a payment of $800 (assuming they remain in the program for the duration; payments are given upon completion of each visit). It can be sobering reading out a person’s struggle with mental illness as rendered on sheets of zeroes, ones, twos; and occasionally threes, fours, and fives. Often the patient whose data I am sorting is just another undergrad student like any of my friends at Cornell. The lab follows extremely strict confidentiality protocol. Every patient is assigned a code-number, and any identifying information like names or SSNs are whited out. All I have seen of any of these patients so far are ghostly CT-scans of their bodies. If I am honest, eight hours of data entry each day is tedious work, but there’s still a life in every binder, and countless more like them who stand to benefit from the Dr.’s research. Friday’s lab meeting is supposed to assign me to some real-life patient visits, and I can’t wait to start!