George Smith Email & Phone Number

Since graduating from Smith College School for Social Work in 1976, I have spent my entire career at McLean Hospital. The first 14 years were spent working as a social worker on inpatient psychiatric units, mainly doing family therapy. In 1990 I became the Program Director of the first of McLean's residential partial hospital programs for treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). In 1996, I started and directed an Intensive Outpatient Program for treatment of BPD, and became Program Director of the Borderline Center Outpatient Program in 2001. That program was renamed the Gunderson Outpatient Program in 2014, and I also was appointed as Clinic Director for the Outpatient Personality Disorders Service in 2013.My clinical orientation has always been psychodynamic, and I moved from doing systems-based family therapy earlier in my career to doing psychodynamically oriented groups and psychotherapy through the present. I am also interested in Mentalization Based Treatment (MBT) and have been doing MBT groups since 2005. I have advanced training in MBT and currently serve as a senior supervisor on McLean's MBT Clinic. I supervise psychiatry residents in group therapy and have held an appointment to Harvard Medical School since 2000. I am particularly interested in the interpersonal hypersensitivity that characterizes patients with BPD, and emphasize treatment approaches which address this problem.I have been on the board of the Boston Chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention since 2012 and currently serve as president.

Listed skills include Treatment, Psychology, Mental Health, Behavioral Health, and 13 others.