Robert C. Smith Email & Phone Number

HAS MEDICINE LOST ITS MIND? will be published by Prometheus Books in Spring 2025.I came to Michigan State University in 1985 and, blessed with a propitious environment and avid learners, I have been involved in teaching and research in: i) patient-centered communication and ii) primary care mental health. Our work has been featured on the Today Show as well as interviews in the following: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Elle, Ladies Home Journal, Time, and Newsweek. The topics have included training doctors to establish better doctor-patient relationships, how to manage chronic pain, and caring for mental health problems in primary care.Our research team defined the specific skills needed for patient-centered interviewing, which elicits personal and emotional information about the patient, as a repeatable method that can be systematically taught. Later, after showing it was evidence-based in randomized controlled trials, I wrote a popular interviewing textbook--now titled Smith’s Patient-Centered Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Method. Colleagues joined me as authors for the 3rd and 4th editions, the latter published in 2018 by McGraw Hill. Endorsed by the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare, the text has been translated into several other languages and is used in medical schools in the USA and abroad for teaching interviewing and the doctor-patient relationship. More recently, our team defined a skills-specific, replicable model--the Mental Health Care Model--to guide primary care clinicians in managing mental health and substance use problems. We demonstrated that the method was easily learned and effective in improving patient outcomes in two clinical trials. We then demonstrated that teachers can be taught the model and, in turn, teach it successfully to residents. The result: our Michigan State team published a second textbook, Essentials of Psychiatry in Primary Care: Behavioral Health in the Medical Setting (McGraw-Hill, 2019); it is endorsed by the American College of Physicians and used for instructing learners in primary care psychiatry. In addition to my academic works, I currently am writing a trade book for the public, with the working title Has Medicine Lost Its Mind?—How to Improve Mental Health Care. I address the famine in the midst of plenty that poor US mental health care represents and how to correct it.