Psychiatrist Steers Ailing Institutions Down Path to Better Health

Not long ago, Peter Buckley, M.D., hopped into his black Volkswagen convertible and drove a visitor across the campus of the Medical College of Georgia to show off the Department of Psychiatry's new digs.

Buckley said that he considered the new building “a very important part of my own journey, my story.” Indeed, it is a tale of a psychiatrist leaving the wet, cool climate of Dublin, Ireland, and ending up in the small American city of Augusta, Ga., replete with sunshine, sultry temperatures, and the scent of magnolias.

Buckley was born in Dublin in 1962 and did his medical studies and psychiatric training at University College Dublin. In 1991, at age 29, he was doing a schizophrenia research fellowship in Dublin when, as he put it,“ serendipity played in.” He had the opportunity to attend a schizophrenia research meeting in Tucson, Ariz., that was organized by Charles Schulz, M.D., at the time chair of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His contact with Schulz and other American psychiatrists led to his applying for a faculty position at Case Western, which, he said, “was just brimming with intellectual excitement, as Dr. Schulz and Dr. Herbert Meltzer had brought together stellar schizophrenia investigators from all over the world.”

But then he faced the challenge of obtaining a visa to work in the United States, a challenge he met successfully. And in 1992 he and his wife moved to the United States.

“From the beginning, it confirmed itself as a great opportunity,” said Buckley. He ran an outpatient program, got involved in several research projects with Meltzer, and received a start-up grant from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders.

Then in 1994, opportunity knocked again. Michael Hogan, Ph.D., was commissioner of Ohio's Department of Mental Health (and later headed up the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health). Hogan believed that Ohio's public mental health system could profit from a strong relationship with Case Western University School of Medicine. He also believed that Buckley could facilitate that relationship. So Buckley was offered the job of medical director of a state psychiatric hospital in Cleveland.

“It was a really terrific opportunity in administrative experience at a relatively junior stage of my career, and I was very fortunate to have the support of Drs. Hogan and Schulz,” he said.

The hospital was under a state mandate to improve its care and facilities. Buckley helped it do so. By 1998, the hospital was voted the best psychiatric hospital in Ohio by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Also between 1994 and 1998, Buckley became medical director of two more state psychiatric hospitals in the Cleveland area and rose to the rank of professor and vice chair of psychiatry at Case Western.