July 2024 Champion: Jessica Isom

Blog > Champions of the Month > July 2024 Champion: Jessica Isom

July 30, 2024 | By: Ira Dreyfuss

Jessica Isom, MD, MPH


Photo provided by Jessica Isom

Jessica Isom believes in putting broken things together. A psychiatrist in ​Boston,​ Massachusetts, Dr. Isom offers what amounts to a psychiatric approach to a world that looks like it could use mental health care​ and support.

The term is liberation psychology — how to think and act “in a world that is not structured to support you,” Dr. Isom says. Liberation psychology examines the mental and social conditions of people and communities in sociocultural traps, and at ways to get free of them. These include assessments of the problems and solutions, and working across social barriers to make the solutions real. “I see injustice through a health equity lens,” she says.

Advocacy is crucial, Dr. Isom says. “When we are doing that advocacy work, we are imagining a better future, we are working toward a goal,” she says. “These things have direct benefits to our mental health and well-being.”

In other words, Dr. Isom says, “There’s hope.”

But Dr. Isom did not come by this hope easily. She describes herself as an Army brat, living in several states, but mostly in North Carolina — and mostly poor. Shopping at Dollar Tree, suffering through stifling Southern summer heat with varied access to air conditioning, living near bus terminals,​ and breathing the buses’ toxin-laden exhaust — “That was my childhood,” she says.

As a child, she could not make the connection between the conditions and the causes; it was all just life as it was lived. But as Dr. Isom matured, things became clearer. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she took a course in health equity. “That course was like the seed,” she says. “It contextualized all my experiences.”

Dr. Isom deepened her understanding through the Medical Society Consortium’s Climate and Health Equity Fellowship, examining what psychiatrists could do in their relationships with their patients. This goes beyond knowing, for instance, whether medications may raise health risks in patients without AC. It’s helping ordinary people understand how they think — for instance, the fear response rooted in the amygdala. She suggests encouraging people to pause to see if the fear is justified.

Her approach is to use her psychiatric training to bring people together. Collaboration is a powerful response to climate change, as well as to systemic societal inequity — “fitting yourself into places that already exist, broadening discussion,” she says. “That’s how I’m conceptualizing this for myself.”