In a well-populated classroom, Dr. Zohar Lederman led a lively and empathetic discussion on the bioethics of loneliness.
“We often don’t ask about loneliness in our patients,” Lederman said. “And when we do, we don’t do anything because it’s outside our paradigm.”
But Lederman, a public health ethicist and emergency department physician living in Hong Kong, aims to change that perception. He notes that people who suffer from loneliness die faster, with higher blood pressure, weaker immune systems, and other health problems. Because physicians so often focus on acute medical issues, they can unintentionally neglect clear symptoms of loneliness, which disproportionately affects people who are elderly, people with disabilities, and teenagers, he said.
“If we agree that public health should be about mental health in general and include loneliness to some degree, we have an obligation as part of the community to help people not to be lonely,” he said. “What is the way to do that?”
These and many similar questions filled the seven-week Sherwin B. Nuland Summer Institute in Bioethics, run by Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, which is supported by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
“ISPS is tremendously proud to support the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics,” said ISPS Director Alan Gerber. “The summer program has justifiably grown into an exemplary destination at the very forefront of scholarship and international collaboration to explore moral considerations within the most urgent, constantly evolving topics we face as a society.”
Begun in 2006 as a program for Yale College students, the summer institute now invites people from around the world, across different fields, and at various career levels. Before and after the pandemic, about 70 students attend in-person seminars on contemporary pressing issues in bioethics, with another 75 attending an online introductory course on the foundations of ethical theory, ethical policymaking, and bioethical principles, terms, and history.
“We are increasingly facing complex and time-sensitive ethical challenges ,” said Lori Bruce, associate director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and director of the summer program. “Vulnerable communities are becoming even more fragile due to global warming, war, and the changing nature of reproductive rights in many states.”
The program aims to provide attendees with tools and resources to explore principles of bioethics across disciplines, in an affordable and hands-on way. And then to return home and help raise awareness among colleagues and classmates.
“We include clinicians, legal scholars, social workers, and philosophers,” she said. “It’s not uncommon for a physician from Turkey to engage in a morally laden discussion with a legal scholar from Singapore and a divinity student from Nepal.”
This year’s class represents students from more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Singapore, India, and Brazil.
“As someone with an international background and a global orientation, I am really happy that everyone in this seminar is from different places,” said Nathifa Greene, an assistant professor of philosophy who teaches bioethics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
She attended this year’s program to gain the insight of clinicians and people who work in policy and various disciplines so she can revamp and reframe her course materials in consideration of new technologies and the changing legal landscape represented by developments such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.
“So, we are learning about health care systems in different places — different kinds of cultural questions in bioethics,” Greene said.
In addition, attendees’ professional development ranges from established educators like Greene to undergraduate students like Abigail Murphy, a Canadian citizen who is studying philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario with the goal of becoming a clinical bioethicist and educator focused on disability advocacy.
“The people who I am meeting and the experiences that are being shared with me from such a global perspective are things that I would never have been able to come to see or understand,” Murphy said. “I can tell how much this is going to help me moving forward. It’s already helped me so much just in my general understanding of the field.”
Stephen Latham, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, said several past attendees have gone on to earn doctoral degrees and then return to teach.
“We want to make the summer program the best place in the world to get a beginner’s introduction to bioethics,” Latham said.
