In this presentation, I will provide an overview of three questions: how the brain processes art and how art impacts the brain. I then discuss the relation between art and mental health, and how art can be therapeutic.

Presenter(s):
Dr. Keshavan is Stanley Cobb Professor and Academic Head of the Harvard Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has conducted early psychosis intervention and research for nearly three decades. He founded one of the first early psychosis clinical programs in the nation, services for treatment in early psychoses in Pittsburgh in 1990. He has published over 600 papers and 4 books on psychotic and related disorders including early psychosis neurobiology and intervention and organized educational conferences focused on early intervention in psychosis, biannually in Pittsburgh in Detroit and annually in Boston. He has been developing, efficacy-testing, and implementing cognitive enhancement therapy (CET), listed as an evidence-based intervention for schizophrenia by SAMHSA in the early course of schizophrenia over the past decade. He edits the Elsevier journal Schizophrenia Research, and is on the editorial board of several other journals, including the Journal of Early Intervention in Psychiatry, and is the recipient of the 2019 Research Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).