Iowa Health Care – Go Retire Psychiatrist

We enjoyed the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Education (originally given on January 17, 2023) by Dr. Russell Ledet. He’s definitely a mover and a shaker and this is another recorded presentation that I wish was available for the general public.

His bio is knockdown impressive. And even more interesting to me is that he’s presently in residency toward boarding in adult psychiatry and child psychiatry as well as pediatrics.

That’s right—triple boarding.

His talk was a fascinating oral autobiography from his upbringing in poverty to his military career, to his undergraduate and graduate college career, and his achievement in organizing a very successful nonprofit, The 15 White Coats. This helps get underrepresented minority students into medicine by giving them inspiration and financial support.

His life story by itself is inspiring. It’s also exhausting. The person introducing him wondered aloud if he ever slept!

He began with a well-known quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

Dr. Ledet’s story of his path from bootlessness to crowning success is compelling. You really have to hear it from him to get a clear idea of how difficult it was. It’s hard to imagine that a star like him once rummaged through dumpsters for food for the family while his mother was on the lookout to make sure he didn’t get caught.

I think a big part of what kept him going was his wife and kids. In fact, his wife, Mallory Alise, insisted that he take the path because of her fear he would die if he continued a dangerous assignment in the military.

A member of the audience who had a career similar to Dr. Ledet asked a question about what more should he do to make sure young people of color would get the kind of opportunities to succeed. Dr. Ledet had a very good answer, but that was not the most interesting part of the interaction. Firstly, the questioner didn’t sound (I know this is going to sound crass) black. He sounded more like someone who had grown up in the Northern United States—like me. But during the course of the conversation, it was clear that he was black. He just didn’t sound like Dr. Ledet. He also mentioned, almost in passing, that some people of color who succeed may develop imposter syndrome.

This sounded strange at first, but I quickly realized that I sometimes had felt like an imposter. This cuts two ways with me. One was the obvious context in which I came out of an impoverished background to finish college and medical school, and had a career as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist at a university medical center where I published and taught for many years. At times I felt like a phony.

The other situation in which imposter syndrome arose was when I went to Huston-Tillotson University (an HBCU formerly called Huston-Tillotson College) in Austin, Texas back in the 1970s. Most of the students were from the region. I had a Northerner’s accent and somebody once remarked on it, asking me “Why do you talk so hard?” I was easily identified simply because of how I spoke. I didn’t always feel comfortable, despite for the first time being not the only black guy in school. Ironically, I didn’t feel like I fit in, even in an HBCU. Even among those who looked like me, I sometimes felt like a phony. But that was not an enduring affliction.

And I think Dr. Ledet has a great deal of confidence and energy. More power to him.

There’s something embarrassing yet fascinating about reading my old blog posts from years ago. The one I read yesterday is titled simply “I Remember HT Heroes.” I make connections between my undergraduate college days at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University (an HBCU in Austin, Texas) and my early career as a consultation psychiatrist at The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics (now rebranded to Iowa Health Care).

My first remark about getting mail from AARP reminds me that organization is sponsoring the Rolling Stones current tour, Hackney Diamonds. And the name of my specialty was changed from Psychosomatic Medicine to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry in 2017.

The photo of me attached to the original post reminds me of how I’ve gotten older—which also makes me hope that I’ve gotten wiser than how I sound in this essay. The pin in my lapel is the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine award I received in 2006.

I Remember HT Heroes

Getting membership solicitations in the mail from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is a sure sign of aging, along with a growing tendency to reminisce. Reminiscence, especially about the seventies, may be a sign of encroaching senility.

Why would I reminisce about the seventies? Because I’m a baby boomer and because my ongoing efforts to educate my colleagues in surgery and internal medicine about Psychosomatic Medicine, (especially about how to anticipate and prevent delirium) makes me think about coming-of-age type experiences at Huston-Tillotson College (Huston Tillotson University since 2005) in Austin, Texas. Alas, I never took a degree there, choosing to transfer credit to Iowa State University toward my Bachelor’s, later earning my medical degree at The University of Iowa.

Alright, so I didn’t come of age at HT but I can see that a few of my most enduring habits of thought and my goals spring from those two years at this small, mostly African-American enrollment college on what used to be called Bluebonnet Hill. I learned about tenacity to principle and practice from a visiting professor in Sociology (from the University of Texas, I think) who paced back and forth across the Agard-Lovinggood auditorium stage in a lemon-yellow leisure suit as he ranted about the importance of bringing about change. He was a scholar yet decried the pursuit of the mere trappings of scholarship, exhorting us to work directly for change where it was needed most. He didn’t assign term papers, but sent me and another freshman to the Austin Police Department. The goal evidently was to make them nervous by our requests for the uniform police report, which our professor suspected might reveal a tendency to arrest blacks more frequently than whites (and yes, we called ourselves “black” then). He wasn’t satisfied with merely studying society’s institutions; he worked to change them for the better. Although I was probably just as nervous as the cops were, the lesson about the importance of applying principles of change directly to society eventually stuck. I remember it every time I encounter push-back from change-resistant hospital administrations.

I’m what they call a clinical track faculty member, which emphasizes my main role as a clinician-educator rather than a tenure track researcher. I chose that route not because I don’t value research. Ask anyone in my department about my enthusiasm for using evidence-based approaches in the practice of psychiatry. I have a passion for both science and humanistic approaches, which again I owe to HT, the former to Dr. James Means and the latter to Dr. Jenny Lind Porter. Dr. Means struggled to teach us mathematics, the language of science. He was a dyspeptic man, who once observed that he treated us better than we treated ourselves. Dr. Porter taught English Literature and writing. She also tried to teach me about Rosicrucian philosophy. I was too young and thick-headed. But it prepared the way for me to accept the importance of spirituality, when Marcia A. Murphy introduced me to her book, “Voices in the Rain: Meaning in Psychosis”, a harrowing account of her own struggle with schizophrenia and the meaning that her religious faith finally brought to it.

Passion was what Dr. Lamar Kirven (or Major Kirven because he was in the military) also modeled. He taught black history and he was excited about it. When he scrawled something on the blackboard, you couldn’t read it but you knew what he meant. And there was Dr. Hector Grant, chaplain and professor of religious studies, and champion of his native Jamaica then and now. He once said to me, “Not everyone can be a Baptist preacher”. My department chair’s echo is something about how I’ll never be a scientist. He’s right. I’m no longer the head of the Psychosomatic Medicine Division…but I am its heart.

I didn’t know it back in the seventies, but my teachers at HT would be my heroes. We need heroes like that in our medical schools, guiding the next generation of doctors. Hey, I’m doing the best I can, Dr. Porter.