I always wanted to be a writer, and my writing has spanned just about every form there is—fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, and scholarly work. For me, writing requires the whole person, mind, heart soul, body, everything you’ve got. It’s wonderful when it works and its agony when it doesn’t. 

Recently I was working, for the umpteenth time, on a poem about a song sparrow that takes refuge on a hot day in a corrugated metal box covering the back steps from an office building to a parking lot. Glistening metallic in the sun, the sparrow mistakes it for a fruit tree, flies in at the bottom and wind its way up, trapped. I intended the poem as an elegy for a colleague who committed suicide, and it was fine except for a clunky transition from the bird’s imagination (fruit tree) to reality (metal box-trap) at the very beginning. Suddenly, on the umpteenth time, I thought of reversing the order—the metal box-trap  (reality) coming first, and the fruit tree (imagination) going second. It worked. I was as happy as I’d be getting a phone call that NIH was going to fund a grant proposal I’d submitted, and at a deeper level.  

Much of my research and writing over the past 20 years concerns “citizenship” as an applied theoretical framework for the social inclusion and participation of people with mental illnesses. Citizenship, in my and my colleagues’ work, is defined as a person's strong connection to the 5 Rs of rights, responsibilities, roles, resources, and relationships that society offers its recognized members, along with a sense of belonging that is validated by others. This research is organized under the Citizens Community Collaborative of the Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH) in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. 

Related to this work is my past and continuing writing and research on homelessness and mental health outreach and peer-informed interventions for people with mental illnesses. I also write and have conducted research in the areas of narrative medicine, patient-doctor relationships, high-technology medicine, and medical errors, and interventions to support the “motive control” of people with strong revenge feelings against those who have wronged them. 

I am Co-Director of PRCH, Director of the Citizens Community Collaborative, and Editor of The Perch, a Yale literary, visual arts, and music journal.