East Coast Child Psychiatrist: Touching Children in Therapy Was Forbidden. "At Yale We Were Taught Not To Put Even A Hand On the Shoulder of a Child."

[ORIGINAL POST DATE: 8/11/09 - Moved for visibility and continuity]

Ever since defense expert Dr. Gil Kliman rhapsodized about fancy East Coast medical schools on the witness stand, (and in the process somehow intimating that any child psychiatrist who trained there had received a far superior education), we've been dying to talk to more of those Ivy League child shrinks ourselves.

Specifically, we wanted to find a child psychiatrist who actually did his residency in child psychiatry at Yale. Dr. Ayres, as many of you know, did his residency at Yale. For years he's been trying to sort of give the impression to folks in San Mateo that he studied child psychiatry at Yale, but that is not so. In his first year of residency he studied pediatrics and then spent two years working in adult psychiatry. Part of that time involved working at a Veterans Hospital in Connecticut. How he learned about child psychiatry there sure is a puzzle to us!!

Today we tracked down a child psychiatrist who actually did do his residency in child psychiatry at the Yale New Haven Children Center. The person we found was child psychiatrist Dr. Morton Kurland, whose credentials are:

Harvard Medical School
Graduation Date:
1960
Post Graduate Training:
University Hospitals, Ut - Intern (7/1/1960-6/30/1961)Mass Mental Health Center - Resident:Psychiatry (7/1/1961-6/30/1963)Yale Child Study Center, CT - Resident:Child Psychiatry (7/1/1966-6/30/1968)Harvard Schl Public Health - M.S. (7/1/1992-6/30/1995)

In our conversation with Dr. Kurland, who has a child psychiatry practise in Fall River, Massachusetts, we started off by asking the question that all of us who follow this blog want to know: In his training at Yale, was he taught to give kids "physicals" in therapy?

Dr. Kurland was shocked by this question. "Absolutely not !" he told us. "We were taught the exact opposite. We weren't allowed to. We were taught not to put even a hand on the shoulder of a child."

So, we continued, what about this line that Ayres has that child psychiatrists on the East Coast at places like Judge Baker and Yale were taught to touch children as part of therapy?

"That's bogus," Dr. Kurland told us. "I don't know of any child psychiatrist anywhere who was trained this way. For him to use this as an excuse for his behavior is pathetic. The idea that child psychiatrists do this sort of thing is just off the boards. "

We want to thank Dr. Kurland for speaking with us. And hey, you never know--he might be someone who could come in handy for the prosecution.

UPDATE:

We would welcome hearing from other child psychiatrists who read this blog about their own training. Were any of you trained to give regular physical exams to your own patients?