Through the Times With Ronald Pies, M.D.

Psychiatric Times November 2005 Vol. XXII Issue 13

Psychiatric Times' columnist Ronald Pies, M.D., is a physician committed to encephiatrics ("brain healing"), a poet with a compassionate heart and a philosopher with a zeal for exploring fundamental issues of life.

A native of Batavia, N.Y., Pies was educated at Cornell University and then continued his studies at the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, where he received his M.D. degree and completed his residency in psychiatry.

"I had the sense from the very beginning that psychiatry was the specialty within medicine that would allow me the greatest breadth and depth in terms of my general interests," Pies told Psychiatric Times.

Several of his professors at Upstate Medical Center (now University), including Eugene Kaplan, M.D., Robert Daly, M.D., Richard Phillips, M.D., and Ellen Cook Jacobsen, M.D., helped him see that that psychiatry "allows one to create a synthesis of sorts, bringing in everything from biology to poetry to art," said Pies, who is now clinical professor of psychiatry at the Tufts University School of Medicine. Pies was also formerly a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Indirectly, Pies said, the residency program stimulated his interest in psychopharmacology.

"We had a very fine program and really excellent teachers, but it was focused much more on psychodynamic psychiatry, including object relations theory, and less so on psychopharmacology," he said.