Personal

I was born in New York City (Manhattan), a 5th generation New Yorker.

My first room at home was a walk-in closet in a one bedroom apartment.

I am the product of the New York State public school system, grades K-12.

Virtually everyone in my quite large extended family was in the women’s shoe business.

I became the first physician in my extended family, having had no interest in the shoe business.

 

My parents were social activists and I was exposed to this perspective my whole life.  For example, they addressed the fact I was in a school system with virtually no minorities by sending me to an all-black after school program in the next town (I was the only white kid), took me on civil rights marches from the earliest years of the movement, encouraged me to work in Olympic National Park (Washington State) when I was 16 years old and to make my way back across the country on my own, and went with me to hear such speakers as Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin and Robert Kennedy in small, local venues.

 

I am the oldest of three boys; one brother is an attorney who specializes in geriatric law and one is an artist who does public art works.  My wife, a retired social worker and I are the parents of three boys; the oldest has developmental disabilities and works at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; the middle one lives in Brooklyn, commutes by bicycle to Manhattan and works as an interaction designer; the youngest in an intensivist cardiologist who lives in Portland and works at Maine Medical Center.  I have one grandson, Maverick, age 2 years old.

 

I was an undergraduate at Williams College and spent the second semester of my junior year as an exchange student at Vassar College.  This was the first year of the exchange and there were about 50 men on a campus of 1600 women. I have always described my undergraduate years as attending an all-men’s school and an all-women’s school but never a coed school.  I have 50-year friendships from that time in Poughkeepsie.

 

I attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania where one of my teachers was Aaron (Tim) Beck.  He remains my friend.  I had the rare opportunity to attend a lecture by Anna Freud while in Philadelphia.  I did a medical internship at Philadelphia General Hospital, the infamous city hospital.  In retrospect, my commitment to public sector work coalesced during that experience.

 

My residency was in Boston in the era that saw the transition from psychodynamic training to a more eclectic mix of psychotherapies and psychopharmacology.  I did an NIMH fellowship titled, “Psychiatry in Primary Care.”  I was a psychiatrist embedded in one of the first academic primary care clinics in the US and fulfilled functions much like what those advocating for the integration of medicine and psychiatry support today.

 

During my last year of residency and during my fellowship I would run across the Harvard Medical School campus from Beth Israel Hospital to the Harvard School of Public Health to take courses that lead to my MPH.  It was here that my interest in global health was solidified.

 

I decided I wanted to be a psychiatrist when I was in junior high school, aka middle school. My first experience at a state hospital was right after I graduated from high school.  I was working at a camp for blind adults, and took two women, attendees of that camp, to visit a friend of theirs at Rockland State Hospital.

 

Several years later, I spent my summer working as a recreation aid at Gracie Square Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital in Manhattan.  My formal exposure to psychiatry began as a first year medical student, enrolled in a didactic course with psychiatric residents.  I was an extern the summer between my first and second years of medical school at Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA. where I had the amazing experience of moving back and forth between the patient and the professional communities, not exactly identified with either.   I spent 4 months of medical school in a mission hospital in western Kenya, my first of many international work experiences.

 

In residency, in my program, trainees had to choose another institution to spend an additional six months doing inpatient psychiatry.  Most residents went to McLean Hospital.  I chose, along with one other resident, to go to Worcester State Hospital. This was another big step on my road to public sector psychiatry.  But I also never left my roots in psychodynamic psychotherapy and have done both throughout my career.

 

Many of you know me from one context or another during my years since I left training.  For those who don’t, please see other sections of my webpage.  You may also see a video of me, responding to three questions, produced by APA at psychiatry.org/elections.

 

Thank you for your time and attention.

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Jeffrey Geller

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Professional

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"I may well have done work in your state at one or more public psychiatric hospitals, public developmental disability centers, private hospitals, or state-wide mental health system. In many instances I was the state's expert in Olmstead cases, Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act cases, or negligence/malpractice cases in psychiatric hospitals."

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