Alumni Profile: Una McCann '80, alleviating the effects of trauma

The mechanic is a patient of psychiatrist Una McCann ’80, who for 20 years has been helping people — ranging from burn and rape victims to war veterans — to manage their symptoms and return to productive lives. An expert in anxiety and stress disorders, McCann is director of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Anxiety Disorders Program. She also is conducting research to help improve methods of predicting, diagnosing, and treating PTSD, leading a group of physicians studying ways to identify those individuals at greatest risk of developing the disorder.

The mechanic is a patient of psychiatrist Una McCann ’80, who for 20 years has been helping people — ranging from burn and rape victims to war veterans — to manage their symptoms and return to productive lives. An expert in anxiety and stress disorders, McCann is director of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Anxiety Disorders Program. She also is conducting research to help improve methods of predicting, diagnosing, and treating PTSD, leading a group of physicians studying ways to predict those individuals at greatest risk of developing the disorder.  

Although the work is in its nascent stage, McCann and her team have begun identifying biological clues called biomarkers whose presence may indicate which patients are most susceptible. 

In the mechanic’s case, McCann and her staff treated him using a combination of medications to reduce nightmares and help him sleep better, and cognitive behavioral therapy that brought the man back to the garage for the first time. He remains unable to work. 

“Working with PTSD patients can be very difficult emotionally,” says McCann, a psychology major and member of ROTC at Princeton. (She conducted research on anxiety disorders at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to fulfill her military obligation.) “The stories we hear are horrendous.”

But while treating trauma patients with severe disabilities can be draining, says McCann, it makes “finding treatments and cures all the more rewarding.”