I am a veteran psychiatrist, father of birth and adopted and foster care children. I am “boarded” in adult, child/adolescent and geriatric psychiatric sub specialties. I am former Duke Univ Med School trainee and clinical faculty and Univ of South Carolina School of Medicine teaching faculty. I have practiced mostly in Durham and  western North Carolina. A few years ago I was the first psychiatrist for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ health service for over four years. My wife is part Cherokee and most of her extended family is in or from Cherokee NC. I lived in many states and 13 foreign countries growing up as my father was an international consulting mining engineer who re-opened King Solomon’s Copper Mine site in the Negev desert in southmost Israel, and my mother was a geologist. I have practiced in many settings in psychiatry, private practice for the first 30 or so year of my career while teaching at medical schools, then the Cherokee Health Service, and now a state hospital in NC working with the most severely mentally ill. Along the way I have consulted for variety part time at a number of public mental health centers, adult and adolescent prisons, adolescent detention centers, nursing homes, consulting on medical/surgical services wherever I have practiced and of course, teaching medical students, psychiatric residents, social work students and psychology trainees.

I am a two time cancer survivor in the last 10 years and this has given me a much different perspective on life in general.

I lived through the hippie revolution and drug age of the late 60’s and early 70’s in one of the radical centers of the country and actually lived in a “co-op” house in Ann Arbor that was one of the centers of such activities, especially radical politics and observed first hand the radicals in action while counting the undercover FBI agents in attendance…It was a wild time and taught me that radicalism is the same on the Left or Right, whether in this country, and the same in religions from extreme fundamentalist movements in this country or in the Middle East. I came to see them as all the same, no sense of humor, fascist, severely 1984 authoritarian, heedless of rights of all but the ruling elites and having worse solutions than the problems they inveigh against.

As an avid reader since very early childhood, reading Treasure Island at four, I have devoured everything I come across a multitude of subjects and consider myself now a nearly old curmudgeon who has seen, experienced, read, and been exposed to enough to offer my own opinions on our culture and contemporaneous movements, influences, politics, and issues of the day and times with some perspective.