Two Career Diversions Posted on December 3, 2007 Michael E. Thase (bio) reflects on turns in the road that worked out well for his career.

I think the biggest two career diversions I took, in retrospect they make perfect sense. I’m not sure they were so planful at the time, but the first was that in 1988, the year after I began work on my first R01 grant, I accepted the opportunity to be the clinical chief of services for the division that I worked with then, and that’s the mood and anxiety disorders division.

And I did this because I thought I needed more administrative experience and as a way of knowing if later in my career I would want to be a chairman or not. And at the end of those ten years, I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish and relinquished the clinical service part of that position, but retained the academic part of it.

Now that may sound odd, but to this day I’m still responsible for the career paths, the annual academic evaluations, of the research being done within the division, but no longer responsible for the care provided on the inpatient units or who’s on call this weekend or the budgets of the clinical service lines.

So in my view I got the more fun part of the job and was able to turn over the more demanding, and from a clinical standpoint, important part of the job to someone who was eager and ready to take on that path as well.

The other kind of short, turned out to be a cul de sac, I went into was in the early 1990s. We were in the midst of a crack cocaine epidemic in many of the urban cities, and the type of psychotherapy that I was very interested in, Beck’s model of cognitive behavior therapy, was appearing to be a promising treatment to help individuals who were dependent on crack and other forms of cocaine.

And at the end of this period, I demonstrated to my satisfaction that Beck’s model of cognitive behavior therapy was not an efficient treatment of cocaine addiction, at least for inner-city populations, that there were easier to learn, better treatments. We demonstrated that the combination of chemical dependence counseling in group, and supplemented by individual sessions, was superior in fact to cognitive behavior therapy.

And over the eight or nine years that we were working on these projects, two of my junior colleagues who wanted chemical dependence disorders to be their life’s work had matured into mid-career investigators. So I was pleased to turn over the next line of investigation to those colleagues to take the lead on.

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