Credentials given for someone with an essay in today’s New York Times prompts me to elaborate my own credentials here

There is an essay in today’s New York Times, “Your Therapist’s Secret Life,” for which the author describes herself as “a psychotherapist,” and in which she refers to the people she helps as “my patients.”

But “psychotherapist” is not a licensed profession—anyone, without any formal training, can call themselves a psychotherapist—and only people with medical licenses are commonly spoken of as having “patients.” Inadvertently, the author’s actual professional credentials have been concealed and exaggerated.

This got me to thinking that I should elaborate my own professional credentials here. In the blog’s heading, I have “M.D.” after my name, which does, indeed, mean that I am a medical doctor. In addition, I am “board certified” in psychiatry by The American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

As a psychiatrist, I did not specialize in multiple personality. Patients were not referred to me who were already suspected of having multiple personality. Some of the patients I discovered to have multiple personality had been treated under wrong diagnoses for years, a few of them by me. I was a psychiatrist for twelve years before I learned what multiple personality actually looks like and how to make the diagnosis.

And even after I learned how to diagnose and treat multiple personality, it involved less than 5% of my patients. If readers of this blog think that I am prone to see everyone as having multiple personality, they are mistaken.

For more than thirty years, I practiced outpatient psychiatry in the adult psychiatry clinic of a general hospital, from which I retired in good standing. I was eager to retire, because I had long planned to use retirement to write a novel. But once in retirement, I decided that my abilities were more suited to writing this blog.

None of the fiction writers I discuss in this blog attended the clinic where I worked, and I have never met, or had any private information about, any of them. I depend completely on what has been published.