Looking Internally on the Fourth Year Anniversary of Our Psychiatry and Society Weekly Videos

Once again, we are posting our very first video for the weekly Society & Psychiatry weekly videos, the predecessor to the weekday columns that followed. We are probably getting close to 200 of these.

Ironically, 4 years later we are again in a contentious presidential election process. Past President Trump and current Vice President Harris were in the last one and now this one. Other social psychiatric issues are still present too, especially what I have come to call the social psychopathologies.

What is distressingly new, it seems to me, is that all of the societal and world conflicts have come home to roost in our collegial relationships. The war in the Mideast has especially contributed to escalating interfaith tensions between psychiatrists of different faiths. The controversial Goldwater Rule is still divisive to some extent. It is as if the countertransference issues of the clinician that sometimes disrupts individual psychotherapy has now spread to our collegial relationships. Our colleagues are a secondary ethical priority. Can we come together in respect, curiosity, and peace?

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.