Madly Chasing Peace

My guest today, Dr. Helen Evrard, originally an internist and allergy/asthma specialist who established a solo practice in Lewisburg, PA, while raising twins as a single mother. In 2004 she sold her practice and moved to Buffalo, NY, to provide a broader education experience for her teen-age children and to join the clinical faculty at the New York State University at Buffalo medical school. She closed her practice early in 2009, and later that year her children left for college. What followed was a state of severe depression, complicated by intractable pain from a congenital back problem. Financially ruined and socially withdrawn, Helen was contemplating suicide when she voluntarily entered a psychiatric facility in 2011.  It was there that a holistic therapist suggested that she “think positively,” and so to fill the extra time on the locked ward she began to write down positive words contained in a random book in the patient lounge.This word list became the basis for her book “Positive Matters.” Dr. Evrard