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Faculty |
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Karen Weihs, M.D. -
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Comprehensive Member Arizona Cancer Center Karen Weihs is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and a Comprehensive Member of the Arizona Cancer Center. She is Medical Director of Psychosocial Support and PsychoOncology Services for the Arizona Cancer Center. Dr. Weihs has developed a model for cancer patients’ mental health care including a collaborative team of oncologists, social workers and psychiatrists. Dr. Weihs received her B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Northern Iowa, her M.D. from the University of Iowa and did her Family Medicine residency at York Hospital in York Pennsylvania, with her final year at Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey. During her last year of Family Medicine residency she also completed an externship in Family Therapy at the Ackerman Institute in New York, NY. Dr. Weihs was Instructor and Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Brown University for four years, where her special interests included teaching interviewing to medical students and integrating family psychosocial assessment into family medical care. Following her work as a family physician, Dr. Weihs did a residency in adult and child psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. She applied for and was awarded a Scientist Development Award for Clinicians from the National Institutes of Mental Health while doing her psychiatry residency. She moved to the George Washington University, Department of Psychiatry, Center for Family Research, for her research training under the mentorship of David Reiss, M.D. Dr. Weihs research focuses on family processes and emotion regulation as they affect both mental health and disease progression in patients with cancer and end stage renal disease. She has written and lectured widely on family influences on medical illness. Dr. Weihs is also an experienced psychopharmacology researcher, focusing on pharmacologic interventions for anxiety and depressive disorders in children, adolescents and adults. At the Center for Family Research she collaborated on prevention studies of children of depressed parents and children in families stressed by parental unemployment. Her current research is a longitudinal study of marital quality in breast cancer patients, examining oxytocin as a mediator of the salutary effects of close personal relationship on disease progression. This is a five-year study funded by the Army Medical Research Program in Breast Cancer Research. She is also collaborating on animal model studies of oxytocin and social bonding with Denise Frank, Ph.D., an animal behavior research specialist at the Arizona Cancer Center. Dr. Weihs sees patients referred from the Arizona Cancer Center for clinical psychiatry care and supervises residents in consultation liaison psychiatry and brief, psychodynamic psychotherapy.
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