Who Is James Griffith, M.D.?

“I love Griff!” Joan Anzia, M.D., Northwestern University’s psychiatry residency program director, told Psychiatric News. “He is truly unique among psychiatrists…so modest and soft-spoken that I suspect that many people don’t know even a portion of his interests or accomplishments…. He is a profoundly spiritual and reflective man, both deep and transparent…. He has been involved in global mental health well before it became fashionable [and] has worked in the international arena to create innovative responses to community trauma in postconflict areas such as Kosovo, and at home he is both an expert clinician and advocate for émigré survivors of political violence.”

“With his deep interests in the influence of culture, the family, and spirituality on mental health, Griff is unusual as a training director in the current era of biological psychiatry,” Steven Wolin, M.D., a clinicial professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, observed. “He has applied these passions to his teaching and clinical activities as well as in his writing. Through his work with immigrant families and refugee victims of torture, Griff has attracted trainees with significant prior research and clinical experience in violence-prone third-world countries.”

“Several factors in Griff’s own personal history and professional development have undoubtedly played a role in this special focus on the immigrant and multiculturalism,” Wolin said. “He was raised in the fundamentalist deep South, but received his psychiatric training in the ‘Brahmin’ culture of psychoanalytic Boston. As a result, he is an inherent multiculturalist, translating charismatic religious experiences to the secular psychoanalytic trainee and Eastern philosophy to the Midwestern WASP.”

“I have known Dr. Griffith for over 10 years,” said Francis Lu, M.D., a professor and director of cultural psychiatry at the University of California, Davis. “He is an outstanding training director, and I believe that his program is an innovative one worthy of recognition…. I nominated Dr. Griffith for the 2011 Creative Achievement Award of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture, which he did win.”