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I, Benjamin Crocker, MD, grew up in Cleveland; my being a psychiatrist is hereditary as my father was a psychiatrist and my mother a social worker. I had no intention of doing anything like this until I spent a term as an enlisted man in the Navy, where the physician's role seemed the most admirable and my training in the humanities impractical. I was allowed into medical school in no small part because I was a veteran, which somewhat disguised my prior aimlessness, and I chose psychiatry as a specialty because it seemed to have the highest cure rate. i began my residency at the University of Michigan where I worked with Barney Carroll and John Greden, among others, and I completed training at the University of Southern California where my teachers included George Simpson, Ed Pi, Dennis Munjack and Marcia Goin. I was departmental chief resident and did a couple of years fellowship mostly doing behavior therapy and medication outcome studies; at the same time I was enrolled for several years in a psychoanalytic institute. |
After my fellowship ended I took a job in CMHC to make ends meet; after a while it dawned on me that I liked working there more than private practice or doing research because of the teamwork with the other clinicians there; and it was there that someone gave me a copy of the AACP newsletter. I joined, and found that many of the issues addressed came up at my CMHC and other public sector workplaces I sampled; emergency rooms, college mental health, teaching family practice residents, and working on intensive case management teams. Emboldened by AACP ideals, I started having meetings with the other psychiatrists at CMHC to address clinical and safety issues; this led to conflict with the administration and within a short time most of us were fired or left. By 1992 there were only 12 AACP members in California and there was no representative to the board of directors, so I volunteered to run and have been a member of the board ever since, moving up to the post of secretary in 1996 after I moved to Maine. My participation in the AACP has greatly influenced me in developing my identity as a community psychiatrist, which has largely supplanted academic and psychotherapist roles I once hoped to develop. While I was briefly active on the council of my APA DB in California, it is the fellowship and stimulation of my colleagues in the AACP that guides my understanding of organized psychiatry and the development of our profession. Currently I have four jobs: I work halftime in the outpatient clinic of the Maine Medical Center, mostly doing medication checks for long-term clinic population as part of a multi-disciplinary team, and work two evenings a week at a crisis response center in downtown Portland. I run a psychiatry consultation clinic for Bureau of Mental Retardation clients 5 hours a week, and finally I am halftime medical director for the Maine Department of Mental Health area II (the central part of the state). Every once in a while I see a private patient but I'm usually too busy. |
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