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Published Online: 15 August 2003

Young Psychiatrists May Face Future in Prison

Joan Arehart-TreichelAuthors Info & Affiliations
Publication: Psychiatric News
Volume 38, Number 16
https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.38.16.0007a
In 1999 Renée Binder, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, approached the chair of psychiatry at the university about setting up a psychiatry and law program and a program in which fellows would provide forensic psychiatry services at San Quentin State Prison. The chair thought it was a splendid idea, and the program was launched in 2000, with Binder as its head.
The program would also be a recruitment tool to get fellows interested in working in prisons after their fellowship was over, envisioned Binder, the chair of APA’s Committee on Judicial Action.
“So many inmates desperately need psychiatric help,” she told Psychiatric News during a recent interview in her UCSF office. “So many have huge mental health problems. For instance, they may be depressed, or anxious, or psychotic. They may have been substance abusers. They may have posttraumatic stress disorder, since many have had horrible, horrible childhoods.”
It looks as though the strategy may be working with the two fellows who served with the program this past academic year—Linda Francis, M.D., and Robert O’Brien, M.D. (see story above).
“By the time this article appears, I’ll be in Phoenix, Arizona, and behind a new set of bars!” Francis told Psychiatric News with a chuckle. “I’m going to be working at Arizona State Prison, which I understand is a relatively new facility. It has its own psychiatric hospital in the prison.”
Although O’Brien has started a private practice since his fellowship ended on June 30 and will not be going into full-time prison work at this point, “I would not be opposed to doing this kind of work at all,” he told Psychiatric News. “I like it.” In fact, he said, “I may be working with the jails, doing competency evaluations.”
Actually, it is the goal of a number of psychiatry and the law programs throughout the United States to lure more psychiatrists into prison, jail, or forensic hospital work, Jeffrey Metzner, M.D., informed Psychiatric News. In addition to being a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Metzner consults to prisons throughout the United States and is chair of APA’s Council on Psychiatry and Law. ▪

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Psychiatric News
Volume 38 • Number 16 • August 15, 2003
Pages: 7

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Published online: 15 August 2003
Published in print: August 15, 2003

Notes

One, if not both, of the University of California at San Francisco’s Psychiatry and the Law Program fellows who worked in San Quentin will continue to do prison work.

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