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Maintaining Healthy Relationships Despite Opposing Views

With the holidays approaching, many of us are looking forward to seeing family and friends. This can also bring lively and sometimes heated debate on topics that family members and friends have opposing views. With the election wrapping up, this year may be a more stressful year for some. Dr. David Rettew, Medical Director of Lane County Behavioral Health, will share tips on how to deal with the stress and how to have a positive dialog with family and friends when there are opposing views. He’ll use his professional and personal experience from his own family gatherings to relate how you can provide your point of view and maintain healthy relationships.

David Rettew, MD is a child & adolescent psychiatrist who currently works as the Medical Director of Lane County Behavioral Health in Eugene, Oregon. He is also a clinical faculty member in the Psychiatry Department at OHSU. Before moving to Oregon in 2021, he worked as a tenured associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Vermont Medical Center and was Medical Director of the child and families division of the Vermont Department of Mental Health. He was also past president of the Vermont Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.  Dr Rettew built and then acted as the first Training Director of UVM’s child psychiatry fellowship program.

He is the author of over 60 peer reviewed journal articles on a variety of mental health topics as well as two books, including Parenting Made Complicated: What Science Really Knows About the Greatest Debates of Early Childhood. He has served as the co-chair of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry’s (AACAP) Health Promotion and Prevention committee and was previously on their journal’s (JAACAP’s) editorial board. Dr. Rettew did his general psychiatry and child & adolescent training at Harvard Medical School within the combined Massachusetts General/McLean Hospital programs. Dr. Rettew writes a regular blog on Psychology Today that has over one and a half million views. 

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