Give Me Some Space: A Conversation with Space Psychiatrist Nick Kanas
It all started with a telescope. It was 1957. A young Nick Kanas stood on a bluff above Portland, Oregon. He was scanning the evening sky for a glimpse of the Soviet Union's unmanned satellite, dubbed Sputnik, as it orbited the Earth.
His imagination caught fire that October night and now, five decades later, as a psychiatry professor in residence at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Nick Kanas, MD, has become a world authority on another kind of space: namely, the mental space inside the heads of astronauts under stress and in close confinement.
It makes sense that humanity's exploration of other planets will be a group effort. Certainly, robots will have their part, but for the foreseeable future, human hands guided by supple and resourceful brains will take the lead. What goes on inside these brains, particularly what we all know as "group dynamics," could decide the success or failure of these long missions.
Kanas has spent decades studying group cohesion, distress and displacement in astronauts, submariners and Arctic explorers. His goal? To equip these explorers with coping tools that will lead them safely to and back from other worlds.
And speaking of other worlds, his research has application to the workplace as well.
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