An interview with Marshall Forstein, MD

Abstract

Marshall Forstein, MD is a psychiatrist who, most recently, was Acting Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Adult Psychiatry Residency Director at Cambridge Health Alliance, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is Vice Chair for Education and Training and Director of the public sector Psychiatry Residency Program at Harvard Medical School. He has served in various positions at Cambridge Health Alliance for over thirty-five years and founded one of the first collaborative care HIV clinics in the 1980s and served for twelve years as the Medical Director of the Fenway Community Health Clinic, the oldest free standing community center for the LGBTQ populations. In this addition to JGLMH’s Oral History Series, Emeritus Editor Jack Drescher, MD, interviews Dr. Forstein about his professional and personal life.

Notes

1 See Lynch, P. E. (2003). An interview with Richard C. Pillard, MD. J. Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, 7(4):63–70.

2 Brody, J. (1982). Psychiatrists on homosexuality: Vigorous discord voiced at meeting. The New York Times, January 26, p. C1. Accessed online August 16, 2019 at https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/26/science/psychiatrists-on-homosexuality-vigorous-discord-voiced-at-meeting.html

3 See Bayer, R. (1987). Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

4 See, for example, Bailey, J. & Pillard, R. (1991). A genetic study of male sexual orientation. Archives General Psychiatry, 48:1089–1096.

5 Socarides and Bieber were prominent proponents of the psychoanalytic view of homosexuality as mental illness. See Bayer, R. (1987). Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.