Mental Health

Dr. Arielle Baskin-Sommers is a licensed clinical psychologist. She received her Sc.B. from Brown University (2007), a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2013), and completed her pre-doctoral internship and fellowship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Substantively, her research is concentrated on understanding individual differences in cognitive and affective processes as they relate to vulnerability for disinhibitory psychopathology. Methodologically, she is interested in integrating a wide range of techniques and technologies to explore this issue. Overall, her professional career goals are based on a desire to develop both innovative theory and research in service of increasing the efficacy of clinical intervention.

Benjamin A. Howell, MD, MPH, MHS grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco along with a Masters of Public Health from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He completed residency and chief residency in the Internal Medicine-Primary Care residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital after which he stayed at Yale to complete a health services research post-doctoral fellowship in the National Clinician Scholars Program. He then stayed at Yale, joining the faculty in the Section of General Internal Medicine and is also faculty in the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine and the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice. Dr. Howell is interested in addressing social and structural determinants of health to improve the health outcomes of individuals, families, and communities impacted by mass incarceration and increase access to evidence-based treatments for addiction.

Kathryn Thomas is an Instructor in the Psychiatry Department and Core Faculty at the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice at Yale School of Medicine, as well as an Affiliated Scholar with the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. She is a licensed psychologist and attorney, and her research interests sit at the intersection of psychology and the criminal legal system. She is particularly interested in the health-harming impacts of incarceration and wrongful conviction from a legal epidemiological perspective, and factors that impact trajectories of psychological adjustment upon re-entry following incarceration. More recently, her research has focused on adapting evidence-based treatments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to meet the needs of people returning home from incarceration, with a focus on incarceration-related moral injury. As a psychologist, she has conducted clinical and forensic evaluations and provided evidence-based therapy to justice-involved clients in a variety of forensic settings (including a forensic hospital, juvenile court clinic, forensic drug diversion program, and public defender office), and she regularly serves as an expert witness in criminal and civil cases across the country. She currently serves as a consulting psychologist to several clinics at the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School, including the Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic, Mental Health Justice Clinic, and Criminal Justice Clinic. She also provides training about mental health to Connecticut law enforcement through the Connecticut Alliance to Benefit Law Enforcement’s Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training program. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from University of Wisconsin-Madison and a J.D. from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She recently completed her clinical internship at Yale School of Medicine’s Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology, and a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice at Yale School of Medicine. She is a licensed attorney in the state of Connecticut, and has experience in criminal defense, post-conviction appeals, and civil rights litigation.