Modest, Humble, and Against Racism: The Forgotten Origins of the Michigan Depression Project
Rejection of a proposed keynote at University of Michigan means that defunding the Eisenberg Family Depression Center should be on the table for discussion.
I had hoped that the conference at the Eisenberg Family Depression Center would give me a chance to reconnect with the University of Michigan Departments of Family Medicine and Psychiatry. I could talk about how my development of research projects had built others’ careers and contributed in no small way to the eventual development of the impressive Eisenberg Family Depression Center.
However, a full and accurate account would involve acknowledging the university’s history of systematic mistreatment of minority and LGBT students and my role in resolving this serious problem. I expected no awards or formal appreciation, although an apology and end to an undeserved and damaging vilification of me that started after I left to take a position at the university would have been appreciated.
Accusations that I stirred up unrest among otherwise content LGBTQ and minority students in the Michigan Clinical Psychology Program.
In the 1990s, there was blatant harassment, verbal abuse, and systematic attempts to drive newly arrived minority and LQBT students out of the University of Michigan Clinical Psychology program. Negative comments made about the student’s mental health were placed in their records based solely on their objections to how they were treated. A referral to psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adjunct clinical faculty or friends of faculty in the community was the standard offer to students who expressed distress.
Eventually, a series of interventions from the outside resolved a lot, but not all of them. I was flattered that I was blamed for the intervention occurring and on the basis that I could take credit for fixing things. However, my contribution was modest but strategic, so someone else deserves the main credit.
The problem started with the unanticipated success of the Black Student Psych Association (BSPA), the LSPA, and the AISPA in recruiting new graduate students. Their mere presence in the program was seen as a threat, and the students’ discontent overwhelmed the program. The new students had substantially less interest than white students in conducting psychoanalytic psychotherapy with highly educated white suburbanites. They sought clinical placements in nearby underserved urban areas., not in private clinics that did not accept insurance.
1994 Official University of Michigan Division of Psychology in Psychiatry Photo.
The white woman with sunglasses is Naomi Lohr, Ph. D. She was nicknamed No Knees Noni by members of the Black Student Psychology Association (BSPA). She was feared and led systematic harassment of LGBQT and minority students. Individual protests led to students getting referrals to mandatory psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the adjunct Clinical Psychology community colleagues, including adjunct clinical faculty.
Dr. Lohr and other psychoanalytic members of the division were upset that the clinical psychology program suddenly had too many students of color, especially gays and lesbians. Students were taught that cowardly liberals on the American Psychiatric DSM committee only removed homosexuality’s listing as a mental disorder because of protests from outside pressure groups, not consideration of strong evidence that being homosexual is harmful to one’s mental health.
Internal documents and formal reports were regularly stuffed in my home mailbox on Culver St in Ann Arbor during the night. I suspected that was done by a Black staff member close to the Departmental Chair. I sometimes sent these documents to black of Latinx students. not usually knowing if the students were the source.
On April 21, 1993, I received back a letter from the depressed graduate representative to an investigatory commission that had been convened. My next Substack story will describe the hurt, outrage, and distress experienced by the BSPA in graphic detail.
It was a tense, frightening environment. The head of the clinical program resigned after I sent a second letter to APA. Some of the APA site visit team resigned and were replaced by senior respected members of APA. I documented the ineptness and inertia of the new APA visitors. Some internal memos from the clinical program implied that my criticism proved I was a racist agitator.
I was not a provocateur or agent of anyone. I was annoyed and worried that the ready availability of supplements would end if I did not employ the specific students whose names I had submitted to NIH after a
A teaser quote
While the Department (and the Clinical Area) claim success for the recruitment of African American and other students of color, it is to be recognized that that success owes to the efforts not of these areas, but to the Recruitment Weekends developed, run and carried out by BSPA, LSPA and AISPA. The Clinical area has no formal or informal recruitment program. BSPA, LSPA and AISPA contact hundreds of students each year, and attempt to educate them about the graduate application process, and about the UM's graduate programs in Psychology.
Quite separately and unknown to me, Psychiatrist David Healy was organizing a sophisticated, coordinated effort international effort to construct the case that I was dangerous and disruptive everywhere I was affiliated and the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychiatry Chair Dwight Evans should fire me before it was too late. I do not know how many letters with nearly identical themes were received. I knew at least 18 letters were received, including repeatedly letters from David Speigel, the Vice Chair of the Stanford Department.
Some letters invoked a personal relationship with Ewans. In his defense, I can say that Evans annoyed me, but Penn’s official response was terse. These letters also defended me in principle to be able to.
I have an email exchange involving Healy that occurred late in the escalating process of organized harassment that was becoming increasingly bold and dishonest. The contents displayed a strategy that was now all too familiar to me.
Healy had already prepped University of Michigan psychiatrist Elizabeth Young with inaccurate information. She wove that defamation into some of her doxxed me. The strategy of dead agenting does not require that information be true or even credible. False accusations are so devastating that I would be afraid of sharing the thread of emails to defend myself if the email exchanges somehow fell into my hands. The information is quite detailed and sounds quite factual.
Eventually, the exchange would be posted on websites frequented by British anti-semites, whose hate for Jews was performative, bad faith, and exaggerated, which makes it all the more dangerous.
If I had known about the specific case of psychiatrist Elizabeth Young and the University of Michigan. I could have gotten psychiatrist Bernard “Barney” Carroll to issue a stern and devastating response. Many department members, including Elizabeth, had been recruited and trained by Barney before leaving for Duke after being passed over in his bid to be department chair. He and other self-identified Holocaust survivors would, by 2014, be fighting the British ant-Semites on social media in solidarity with me.
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Beginning the Mob Kid (MK) Myth
My father, who is now deceased, was in the Italian-Jewish mob of Chelsea, not the Irish mob, and he was not a big player. This photo was taken in Revere, MA ~1986, months before the so-called Cockroach War erupted with the Winter Hill Gang of Jimmie “Whitey“ Bulger. There would soon be at least one assassination attempt on my father. I do not know much because I was estranged from him after I left the infamous Crescent Circle Housing Project at age eight. I moved with my mother and my stepfather to Ben Moreell, an off-base military housing project near Naval Station, Norfolk.
I was only in MA in because I was conducting a week-long training in Brief Strategic Therapy for Depression as part of the Cape Cod Summer Institute. The institute had a relaxed schedule, and organizers provided free condo and car rentals.
On impulse, I drove to a dive bar in Chelsea. It was dark and empty except for the bartender and a single old patron asked where Jimmy Coyne lived. The bartender said he had never heard of Coyne. A patron glared at the bartender and said, “Give the college boy directions to his father’s house.” He then turned to me and said, “The last time you came around, you were at the University of Miami, and you brought your wife.” I replied, “She was a different wife, and it was Miami University of Ohio, not the one in Florida”. The patron challenged me, “You’re trying to tell us that the University of Miani has a branch in Ohio? I think you are trying to bullshit us. “Given the growing tension and violence against bartenders in Chelsea, I realized that I had no idea whether the two were friends or foes. I quickly snatched the slip of paper from the bartender and headed quickly out the door.
At the time of the photo, my new wife and I were about to move to the Institute for Social Research in Arbor. Dr. Anita DeLongis had the primary appointment with Ron Kessler. As an accompanying spouse, Camille Wortman invited me to take an NIMH Senior Fellow position with no clear expectation except that we would write papers together. Thus began the most productive two decades of my entire career.
David Healy’s attempt to construct me as a raging MK was revealed in an email exchange with University of Michigan psychiatrist Elizabeth Young.
Here is an opening sample of accusations in the email thread that were supposed to frighten me into hiding. Some are hilariously wrong, a matter discussed in a future Substack article.
The suggestion is that the minority students were otherwise quite content until I gave out some minority supplements to some students. They were blocked by clinical psychology faculty members from accepting them, which made them angry. I believe that these were among the first minority supplements, and most minority students had no other option for well-paying research experiences with benefits.
The various packets of slurs and hate, some with threats of violence, went out circulating on the Internet where anyone can find them without knowing their provenance or truth or without me knowing who now possessed them
My abstract for a proposed keynote at the University Eisenberg Family Depression Center
I saw the call for abstracts as an opportunity to heal some wounds. and offer forgiveness to the offending members of the clinical program. Theproposal was rejected without feedback, except the abstract was a poor fit.
This presentation is a personal and institutional history of my role in obtaining initial funding for the Michigan Depression Project and the closely related Michigan Heart Project. Few current associates of the Eisenberg Family Depression Center are likely to be aware of this history or how it affects the current gender, ethnic, and racial composition of its staff.
I joined the faculty of the U of M Department of Family Practice without a formal interview. Professor James Jackson recommended that I organize a research program to protect the struggling department from being absorbed into Internal Medicine. Nobody was very optimistic about my success, including me.
No tenure-track or adjunct psychology faculty member in psychiatry held major federal research grant funding.
I obtained two foundation $7000 grants and I labeled file drawers “Michigan Depression Project, and “Michigan Heart Project.” I quickly turned these projects into two RO1s, one from NHLBI and the other was among the first NIMH Mental Health Services grants. I took advantage of new mechanism allowing PIs to support add ons of junior faculty and individual minority supplements and career development awards. Nationally, there was little competition. NIH Program Officers accepted my advice about how to be flexible in funding applications that were often not formally reviewed.
My grants made me eligible to apply for Congressionally mandated funding for the PROSPECT suicide prevention trial and to apply for site-PI of the ENRICH-D trial testing whether treating depression increased survival from a heart attack. Preliminary results from my R01s predicted neither of these huge clinical trials would have positive results. I did not apply, but I had substantial influence over the implementation and interpretation of the outcome of those historic projects. My prediction proved correct, but I did have to be at the level of a rocket scientist to see the folly. I only had to be relatively free of political influence and the confirmatory bias that entails.
My off-campus lab on Huron St. became a safe space for anti-racist and LGBTQ-positive activities. To my knowledge, the lab held the first-ever Victoria's Secret transition celebration on campus for a staff member.
I was unprepared when members of the clinical psychology program tried to bar minority and LGBTQ persons from holding supplements. An intense struggle against racist psychoanalytic faculty from the clinical psychology program ensued. APA became involved on the wrong side. I was vilified for being a troublemaker. Even today I am haunted by misrepresentations and exaggerations of my role in this struggle.
In the presentation, I share highlights of how the early Michigan Depression Project provided solid empirical support for the current EFDC activities. I also provide some constructive criticism and caution about mixing the terminology of projects to improve depression outcomes and reduce deaths by suicide with the language of projects only targeting wellness. My collaboration with DJ Jaffe highlighted this issue.
I cite suppressed official documents detailing the professional carnage of the anti-racist struggle. I will FOIA additional documents. I expect a timely response.
Please accept my humble disclosure of a missing history and my offer of forgiveness. The unique strengths of the EFDC are due in no small part to its solid science and its creative inclusiveness.
We should celebrate those strengths, but we cannot forget or deny the past struggles. No peace without justice.
Coming Up Next: A verbatim copy of a letter from a Black student who served as the student representative to an investigatory committee, as requested by the APA. Here is the opening of one of the many investigatory reports being generated.
Quite the bees nest! Evan