Introduction

This is meant to be my professional, "public facing" weblog. I'm still working out what purpose it's going to serve (besides narcissism), but I think a few goals are:

1. Keep my widespread network of friends and family at least vaguely informed about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
   
2. Provide me a place for introspection, feedback, and general thinking about the process of learning to care for the mentally ill.
   
3. Be yet another sympathetic (I hope) window into what mental illness can mean for individuals and families, and the complicated role of medical professionals in helping both of the above.
   
4. Give me a place to talk about my research activities and future plans, both to help explain to people what the heck it is I do, and also to help me think more clearly about what those goals really are.
   

So, why "Robotic Psychiatrist"? For one thing, "robopsychiatrist" is a strange enough word that it wasn't already reserved. Beyond that, I'm a psychiatrist (or I will be), and I work with robots on occasion. I also hope I can bring some of my prior robotics/engineering training to bear on psychiatry. People certainly can't be debugged the same way software can, but psych in particular seems amenable to a systems approach. The neurobiology of the disorders I'll be treating is (in theory) more of a whole-brain disorder than the specific and easily localized syndromes of neurology. Equally, it takes a whole system to care for our patients. Everyone thinks about the drugs, but those are one small piece of a much bigger picture. Successful treatment of mental disorders means not just pushing pills, but also making sure the patient has good family/community support, that someone's managing/coordinating their care, that they have access to crisis services, and that their disease is understood in the context of their whole life. Thinking about how to put all those pieces together is the kind of problem I tend to enjoy and (sometimes) be good at, which I think is part of why I was attracted to the specialty in the first place.

Of course, the first year is mostly training in acute inpatient medicine/psychiatry, so most of that will be starting and tweaking meds, but I hope I'll have a chance in there to talk about the human side of the job and the patients.