Category Archives: News

David A. Harrison Remembered

Posted on by
dave-harrison

David A. Harrison (1957-2018)

A great friend of Samaritan Center of Puget Sound, David A. Harrison, M.D., Ph.D., passed away on August 3, 2018. We knew him as a deeply caring, wise, and incredibly knowledgeable healer, a psychiatrist of diverse gifts who consulted with Samaritan Center clinicians regularly in the years leading up to his death. He was an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, consulting psychiatrist for the Mental Health Integration Program, and an attending physician at the Consult-Liaison and Inpatient Psychiatry Services, UWMC.

Dave was born June 26, 1957, in Castro Valley, CA, the son of Florence (Montana) Harrison and Melvin Harrison (deceased). He attended Livermore High School and graduated from Stanford University with honors. His MD and PhD in nutrition were from the University of California, Davis, and his internship and residency in psychiatry were at Oregon Health and Sciences University. As a UW fellow, he engaged in chaplaincy training and developed mental health training materials for chaplains while a Templeton Foundation-funded Visiting Scholar at the HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York. He was board certified in Neurology and Psychiatry, and in his decade at UW, received numerous awards and contributed extensively through journal articles and presentations.

Dave was passionate about team-based, collaborative, and integrative approaches to mental health care, and committed to providing mental health services for those who were underserved. His extraordinary gifts of intelligence, curiosity, compassion and humility have made a significant difference in the lives of those he touched in his work and personal life. Dave will be deeply missed by his family, colleagues and friends.

A Funeral Mass was celebrated at Blessed Sacrament Church on Saturday, August 18. A reception followed Samaritan Center of Puget Sound (564 NE Ravenna Blvd, Seattle).

RainWise in Seattle

Posted on by

Small cisternsOn April 10, 2018, Samaritan Center of Puget Sound hosted a festive gathering to celebrate the installation of seven new cisterns at the main office on Ravenna Blvd. This project was a cooperative effort involving Samaritan Center, RainDog Design (contractor), and RainWise (initiator and funder). RainWise is a joint program of Seattle Public Utilities and King County’s Wastewater Treatment Division.

Installation of the cisterns helps control storm water, a significant source of pollution in Lake Washington, Puget Sound, Lake Union, and the Duwamish River. “We take our agency name, in part, from Puget Sound,”said Jim Ramsey, a Samaritan therapist who also oversees the physical plant of the Green Lake office, “so it seemed natural that we play a small part in maintaining the health of an immensely valuable regional resource.”

Large Cisterns

Samaritan Center of Puget Sound ‘s newly installed cisterns will capture runoff from 100% of their roof area, effectively keeping 30,159 gallons of storm water out of the combined sewer system each year. With the new cistern capacity at Samaritan Center, the RainWise Program now has more than 1400 participants. By channeling storm water runoff from over 40 acres of impervious rooftops to green infrastructure facilities such as rain gardens or cisterns, these properties are keeping millions of gallons of runoff out of the combined storm water/sewer system, and controlling overflows in local water bodies during heavy rains.

Samaritan Center urges other businesses, neighbors, churches, and community organizations in eligible basins to take advantage of this program. Private property owners in the Greenlake, University District, Maple Leaf neighborhoods and many others throughout Seattle are eligible for RainWise rebates. Rebates may cover up to 100 percent of the cost to install a cistern or rain garden.

In the Shadow of Gun Violence

Posted on by

I was drawing the Giza Plateau, shading the pyramids to convey centuries of desert erosion while trying to keep my extra ebony pencils from rolling off the uneven art table I was sitting at with three other students. It was only second period, intro to line drawing. The class was quiet, students poring over their sketch pads, the soft steps of our instructor traced between the tables as he glanced over our projects. I looked up when I heard the classroom’s television turn on and saw one of the administrators of my small, private high school flipping through channels. She stopped on the local news and took a step back, keeping her back to the class and her eyes locked on the screen. Everyone was watching now; a parking lot full of ambulances, cop cars, crying teenagers. It was breaking news from Littleton, about thirty miles away from my school in Boulder, and the anchor was saying “possibly twenty dead,” “national tragedy,” and “school shooting.” That was April 20th, 1999 and the first time I had ever heard of Columbine High School.

An emergency assembly was called and it was debated whether or not my school’s one hundred students should be sent home or kept on the grounds for our safety. Parents were called, students lined up at the campus’s single pay phone trying to contact family and friends possibly affected by what was happening. Grief counselors were called in the following day and talked to us about what had happened and comforted us as best they could. Our lives had been disrupted, disturbed. I was fortunate in that no one I knew was hurt in that attack, but the doors suddenly felt thin, the walls flimsy, the glass brittle. I felt vulnerable in places that had previously felt safe.

America has a sad history of school related gun violence that goes back to the 1850’s, but Columbine was the worst up to that point and changed everything. It has left an indelible mark upon our country and is still synonymous with feelings of tragedy and anger even fifteen years later. Eventually, my fear subsided and going to class felt like the routine it once had. Eight years after Columbine I was sitting in a lecture hall at a community college in Seattle when the campus alert system engaged and alerted us to a shooting occurring at Virginia Tech, with twice the number of fatalities of Columbine. Then again three years later, as a student at UW, it was a shooting at nearby SPU. I went home those nights with that same sense of vulnerability I had experienced as a teenager, but my relationship to it had changed. I allowed myself to feel it, but I did not allow it to control me.

Gun violence has cast a shadow over nearly my entire educational career and has become a tragic reality for the 48 million children enrolled in our school system. Even our universities are now affected, but frankly, I’m more worried about my low-sleep/high-sugar lifestyle than I am about encountering gun violence. If there is a single message I would convey to a student, regardless of age or institution, it would be, “be aware, be careful, but do not let fear govern your life.” So much of our anxieties revolve around circumstances outside of our control and are not helped one bit by heaping our worries upon them. Life is precious and is better spent studying the things that interest you, pursuing your dreams, and achieving your goals – things that fear will not allow.