Paul Summergrad, M.D., 141st President, 2014–2015

It is a privilege and a pleasure to be able to make this introduction today.

It is also a bit intimidating. Speaking about a colleague or friend is challenge enough, but doing justice to one’s life partner requires just the right balance of honesty and tact.

Almost exactly 30 years ago, I arrived on the scene of Paul’s life, just at the point where his professional life had become solidified and his career was about to take off. We had both just finished our training in internal medicine and psychiatry, very much committed to being doctors. I was at the start of 30 years of working on the consultation service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Paul was at the beginning of his career doing medical psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. But his trajectory would be much different and much more expansive than either one of us could have ever imagined at that moment.

But let me go back for just a few moments. Paul grew up in the Bronx—a red diaper baby, forged in the politics of his immigrant family’s activist and Jewish background, wrapped in the bonds of cooperative living and union brotherhood with loving parents and a very bright younger brother—not far away from that secular place of worship known as Yankee Stadium. It was paradise until he suffered the first glancing blow of his idyllic young life—they moved to the suburbs. Despite this upheaval, at least it was the 60s, and whatever was lacking in his immediate suburban environment, the larger world on television and radio—news, music, drama—and the wanderings of his own inquisitive mind provided many outlets. His passions—Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Eastern religions and playing the guitar—transported him beyond the suburban borders. The next 10 years were spent in the icy incubator of upstate New York. First, college in Buffalo, where taking courses like Guerilla Warfare ultimately gave way to 4 serious years studying Zen Buddhism in Rochester, which eventually led to medical school back in Buffalo, becoming a serious student of the human body and the human mind.

The next big chapter of Paul’s life came with the move to Boston, doing medicine at Boston City Hospital and psychiatry at Mass General, where shortly after graduating he was involved in creating the first medical psychiatry unit there. We met in 1985, and by 1986, he had experienced the second and third conversions of his young adult life—he returned to his Jewish roots and the study of Jewish mysticism, and he left his beloved Yankees to become a full-fledged Boston Red Sox Fan. 1986 was one of those especially difficult years for the Sox, and while some of it may have been his attachment to me, it was clear that the drama and trauma of that season had captured his imagination. But after the team so tragically lost the World Series that year, he came to realize that rooting for the Red Sox was unfortunately a diagnosable psychiatric disorder.

During the next 20 years at Mass General, Harvard and Partners Psychiatry, he consolidated his clinical psychiatric skills and deepened his academic achievements as a consummate medical psychiatrist. But he was also developing his “other sides,” first as the political psychiatrist involved not just in management and finance but in the bigger issues of health policy and the future of medicine and its place in a new and fast changing world. And in his spare time, he managed to finish his psychoanalytic training, knowing that fluency in the knowledge of unconscious processes connects to deeper meanings as a physician and as a person.

In the middle of all of this, our children came along, and “father” of course became the most favorite of his titles.

But Paul was destined for larger stages—he became the Chair of Psychiatry at Tufts and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Tufts Medical Center, a title he has really cherished.

Then more titles and more jobs—Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Tufts Physicians Organization. But it was 2 years ago, when, I believe, he came to the place where he was supposed to be: as the President-Elect and now President of the American Psychiatric Association. All of his life experience, interests, detours, and purposeful-directed journeys could be poured into a job that fit him like a glove. These last 2 years, Paul has devoted himself to the public and political agenda of the APA, promoting the need for strategic planning, while continuing to advance issues that touch the human condition and human spirit. Whether attending the Black Psychiatrists of America Congressional Conference or the World Psychiatric Association Congress, Paul has made the APA a part of the process.

With his support for legislative reform in our country’s complex mental health system, his advocacy for veterans and suicide prevention, and his pioneering role in recognizing faith-based leaders and the powerful role they play in mental health in our grassroots communities, Paul has been both an innovator and a champion.

Finally, Paul has come to embody the virtues of a great leader—not just in the number of publications, or the importance of committee assignments, or names that appear in his rolodex. He does it by being present, by being someone who listens and someone who talks and then someone who listens again, good-humored and open-hearted. Someone with broad shoulders and an even wider mind. A helpful friend, a wise counselor, a loving partner.

I am proud to be able to introduce the 141st and soon to be Past-President of the American Psychiatric Association, my husband, Dr. Paul Summergrad.