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Dr. Smith has been interviewed, featured or quoted on / in: Los Angeles Times, Ladies Home Journal, New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Today Show, and Elle

Dr. Smith is an experienced speaker and can speak on the following topics:

Communication in Everyday Life for Nonprofessionals

Basic communication skills are seldom used, explaining why spouses and others often lament, “S/he never listens.” Dr. Smith describes how to remedy this, emphasizing how to efficiently elicit someone’s personal story and, especially, its emotional dimensions. He then explains how to address the emotions (how to be empathic), and what the course of a much improved conversation should look like.

The Poor State of US Mental Health Care

Many complain they can’t obtain mental health care, indeed, 95 percent of US counties are deficient in psychiatrists. Indeed, there is a severe shortage of psychologists as well as psychiatrists: combined they provide no more than 25 percent of mental health care in the US. Who provides the rest: primary care physicians. Why that is a problem: they are not trained in mental health care. The irony of this medical training miscue: mental health problems are the most common problem clinicians face in practice, more common than heart disease and cancer combined.

Why Medicine is so far Behind Other Sciences

During the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, all sciences advanced dramatically by using a reductionistic approach, meaning that they focused on just one or a few aspects of their science. Over 100 years ago, however, sciences other than medicine scrapped the unidimensional approach to focus on all parts of the subject of their sciences and profound advances followed, for example, relativity and quantum theories in physics, modern biology and ecology, cybernetics and modern computing. Medicine alone continues its isolated scientific focus on the body to the exclusion of other parts of their science: human being’s psychological, emotional, and social features.

Why Medicine Avoids Mental Issues

In the 16th century, the Catholic church allowed anatomists to dissect the human body but only below the head, the latter the source of the mind and spirit and the Church’s province alone. In the next century the Church influenced philosophers, such as Descartes, in the same direction: concentrate on the body and leave the mind and soul to the Church. This so-called mind-body split persists in medicine with its near isolated focus on the body to the exclusion of human beings’ psychological and social features. The evidence: medical training devotes 98 percent of its time to bodily diseases and only 2 percent to psychological and social issues, which include mental and addiction disorders.

The Main Mental Health Problems in the US

We often hear or read of numerous mental disorders, but three problems are commonplace: depression, anxiety, and substance use—often all occurring together. And many of the other, less common problems, such as PTSD and eating disorders and chronic pain, have these three common illnesses as their centerpiece. All three are easily diagnosed by simple questionnaires, so that proven-effective treatments can be deployed, typically medications and/or psychotherapy. Medications can be used by primary care clinicians, who also can consult psychologists and other therapists, but his seldom occurs. Why? They lack training in diagnosing and treating mental disorders.

Chronic Pain – The Most Difficult of all Health Problems

Chronic pain may be due to severe diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, or sickle cell disease, or there may be no disease explanation. When the pain becomes severe and disabling, for whatever reason, patients become depressed, anxious, and often have substance use problems. Even when using the effective psychological treatments for these three conditions, the chronic pain itself often persists as a disabling problem. Not only is that the seed of opioid use problems but it also requires long-term care by a well-trained, caring clinician who can effectively establish a strong relationship with the patient. This seldom occurs.

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