I think probably the early experience that led me to the career I have today was when I was 15 years old and began the first day of volunteer work at a state mental health center. And I got on a bus and went to this place. The whole ride there I couldn’t wait to get there because I knew I wanted to be a psychiatrist already.

But as soon as I began walking through the wards, I started to question that because there were a lot of sick, frightening people, ward after ward ‘till I got to the place that I was assigned. And when I talked to the staff there I thought that they would be picking up on how frightened I was and maybe they would be a bit downtrodden, but instead they were amazingly enthusiastic.

And when I talked to them, I heard that they were about to get a new drug that they were going to use, and that drug was called lithium. And seeing people who were largely unmedicated, who had been in the hospital, in some cases for decades, but in most cases really for at least several years, some of these very frightening people were well within just a couple of months and they were discharged to home. That was a very inspiring sort of experience.

And I don’t know if it’s an accident that the decade between then and finishing residency led me to bipolar. I’m not sure that that’s exactly a straight line. But that was a very powerful sort of experience. That was the dawn of the psycho-pharm era. And I don’t see that many of our trainees get to experience the transition from an unmedicated severely old patient to somebody who has a full recovery.

The idea that people can get all the way better or if they don’t, why don’t they, that has been an underlying theme that I think has pushed me in the direction I’ve gone in my career.