I am a board-certified psychiatrist with a full-time office practice in San Francisco, California. My 30 years of experience includes a strong academic component: I’ve served on the teaching faculty of three Bay Area medical centers, I have a background in psychiatric research, and for 14 years I was chair of the CME (continuing medical education) Committee at the hospital where I teach courses to psychiatry residents. My clinical practice skews toward dynamic psychotherapy, although I also prescribe medication when indicated, and am open to other approaches. I have a longstanding interest in psychiatric and medical ethics, and a healthy skepticism of commercial influences on medical practice.
I added this blog to my practice website in the fall of 2008, making it one of the oldest psychiatry blogs anywhere. It allows me to write about aspects of psychiatry that interest me, and it also serves an educational function for patients, would-be patients, and the general public.
Topical, civil comments on the posts are welcome from anyone; you don’t have to register. You may comment on posts anonymously — just leave the Name, Mail, and Website fields blank. If I publish your comment, your stated name and any URL, but not your email address, will be visible publicly. Please use your own discretion about identifying yourself.
Comments are moderated, which means I read them before they appear on the site. (Also, a great deal of commercial spam is filtered out of the submitted comments.) You can use this moderation process to leave me a non-urgent message. For example, to suggest a topic for a future post, or to ask a general-interest question pertaining to psychiatry or mental health that I can address in a future post, you can do so by commenting on any post and including a clear message that your comment is not intended for publication. Note: This is not a good way to reach me urgently. If you are a patient of mine, or are thinking about becoming one, call my office instead.
Unless you clearly specify otherwise, I assume all submitted comments are intended for publication. Before posting a comment that shares personal issues or touches on sensitive matters, please consider whether you’d like a large population of strangers to read it, even anonymously. I may edit or delete comments that are slanderous, obscene, very lengthy, or just reflect very poor taste. I also consider it impolite for commenters to condemn the very existence of the field being discussed, or to assume evil intent by its practitioners. Thus, while I am happy to engage readers who are critical of specific aspects of psychiatry — I may very well agree with you — this blog is not a soapbox to proclaim psychiatry worthless or evil as a whole. You’re free to express that view, you just can’t use my blog as your mouthpiece.
For a number of years I also cross-posted some of the material here to “Sacramento Street Psychiatry” on the Psychology Today site. Some posts appear on KevinMD as well.
Thanks for reading.