Struggle and Drive Posted on July 7, 2008 Howard J. Aizenstein (bio) finds the flexibility of research helps him balance the demands of academia and family.

It's always a struggle balancing a personal life with a professional responsibilities, and one issue that came to me after having the panel discussing balancing, personal and professional life was my wife should have been the one on the panel rather than me. She has really done a lot of the work at home to help make things work. I often rely on her. She's a developmental, child developmental psychologist, and so she's really shouldered a lot of that responsibility.

I mean, I help out, I do get home every evening for dinner with the kids when I'm in town, and I'll help in the morning and help put them to bed. But she's the one who's really organizes it to make sure it all works.

These challenges of balancing your personal and professional life are obviously not unique to academic psychiatry or academic medicine. You know, friends who are lawyers or clinical, work in the clinical setting, where they have the exact same struggle. And it's just as hard for them and in some ways it's even harder. So it's more just a matter of being driven and wanting to accomplish things in your career that presents the challenge.

And it's really, I don't think in any way should discourage someone from going into academic psychiatry, but like I said, I actually think it's easier in a research career to find the flexibility and to have a family life than it would be if I was doing pure clinical work.

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