Donald Marks, Psy.D.
Don Marks, Psy.D., is a clinical health psychologist specializing in strategies for living with chronic pain and advanced illness. His work on psychological interventions for chronic pain has led to research regarding sport injury and athlete psychological well-being. He is also a marriage and family psychologist, working primarily with couples and families facing medical illness. Dr. Marks completed both the professional practicum and internship in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) at the Jefferson-Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine of Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship and served as a clinical instructor in psycho-oncology and palliative medicine at The Ohio State University Medical Center. He has been a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) since 2005, and he has served as president of the organization's Greater New York chapter.
Courses Taught
- PSYD 7109 - Biological Bases of Behavior
- PSYD 7110 - Professional Seminar
- PSYD 7180 - History and Systems of Psychology
- PSYD 7207 - Marriage and Family Therapy
- PSYD 7480 - Psychopharmacology
- PSYD 8000 - Dissertation Seminar
- PSYD 7701 - Clinical and School Practicum
- PSYD 7401 - Interviewing and Psychotherapy Lab
- PSYD 7431 - Introduction to Evidence-Based Psychological Treatment
Selected Recent Publications
Marks, D. R., Wolanin, A.T., & Shortway, K. M. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Clinical Sport Psychology. Routledge.
Marks, D. R., Seltzer, J., Beck, J. P., & Lerner, J. B. (2018). Lectio for living: An exploration of mindful listening to poetic texts. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 31(2), 87-106.
Cowan, E. N., Marks, D. R., & Pinto, A. (2022). Misophonia: A psychological model and proposed treatment. Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocrd.2021.10069
Santo Pietro, M. J., Marks, D. R., & Mullen, A. (2019). When words fail: Providing effective psychological treatment for depression in persons with aphasia. Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings, 26(4), 483-494.
Wells‐Di Gregorio, S. M., Marks, D. R., DeCola, J., Peng, J., Probst, D., Zaleta, A., ... & Magalang, U. (2019). Pilot randomized controlled trial of a symptom cluster intervention in advanced cancer. Psycho‐Oncology, 28(1), 76-84.
Teaching Philosophy
I invite my students to question the scientific assumptions and methods of the discipline in which we work. Both my therapeutic work and teaching are informed by a descriptive contextualist approach to the practice of psychology. Descriptive contextualism emphasizes the social, historical and relational contributions to psychological knowledge and interventions. As such, it continually examines the values and priorities of the discipline, including ways that psychological discourses (e.g., psychopathology, psychotherapy) contribute to the social construction of human distress.