As a third-generation Japanese American psychiatrist, I have dedicated my career to education, geriatric, cultural and general psychiatry. Since I retired, I wanted to make these blogs to teach what I have learned to guide and empower people to change.
I established one of the country’s first Geriatric Psychiatry Fellowships at Louisiana State University (LSU) through a NIMH training grant, headed geriatric psychiatry programs at Northwestern University, LSU, and the University of Tennessee (UT), served on NIH and NIMH review committees, and was both an examiner and exam committee member for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN), and boards or committees of the APA, the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP), and local Alzheimer’s Disease Association Chapters. I also served on the Editorial Boards of several psychiatric journals, reviewed articles for professional journals, and had many publications and book chapters, culminating in a single-authored textbook, Geriatric Psychiatry Basics, through W.W. Norton and Co. which highlighted cultural psychiatry as a fundamental aspect of care. I was also selected for Best Doctors in America from its inception until retiring.
I received my BA and MD from the University of Chicago. I did an Internship in Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa before completing a Psychiatry Residency at Michael Reese Medical Center in Chicago. I retired as an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, TN.
It is never too late to change
I made two of these for my new twin granddaughters. Every step was new for me, but I had a good reason to do it and I became so engrossed that I lost all track of time. I felt creative because I made this after seeing a PBS Woodwright’s Shop episode and did not have plans or measurements. I figured things out, learned joinery, did not use nails or screws, did not use power tools for much of it, and even constructed a steamer box to bend the wood. It is not a loose association to see this as a lesson in life. To make things happen, I needed a goal, a model, flexibility to work around roadblocks or errors, and the perseverence to just keep going.
One of my mentors, Bernice Neugarten, like dozens of other academics and poets, compared life to a river. A river starts as a trickle in the mountains and gathers strength and momentum as it joins other streams. If it meets an obstruction, it just flows around it, a brief detour while continuing to go in the same general direction. Eventually it becomes a powerful force, creating new life before joining the ocean to renew its cycle. Of course, a curmudgeon can see the same thing and say, “So, everything is downhill from the start, eh?” Some people just need help to see things in a different way.