Ken Thompson, M.D.
Chief Medical Officer
Kenneth S. Thompson, M.D. is the Chief Medical Officer of Recovery Innovations (RI) and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health at the University of Pittsburge and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic From 2007 - 2010 he served as the Medical Director of Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) in the US Department of Health and Human Services. In his current role, he provides comprehensive medical leadership to support RI's mission to lead the way in helping people on their recovery journey.
“Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by an extraordinary array of people. I had the good fortune to grow up in Pittsburgh during the ‘60’s. Naturally I was a Pittsburgh Pirate fan. Roberto Clemente, was my hero, not just for his amazing baseball talents, but also for what he came to symbolize when he died in a plane crash delivering aid to earthquake survivors in Nicaragua. I had other heroes, closer to home. My father was a physician. I remember walking the streets of Pittsburgh with him, and seeing so many people from all walks of life come and shake his hand and say how much he had done for them. My mother went back to school and became a history teacher while she raised my three brothers and me after my parents got divorced.
Somehow, by the time I finished high school I knew I wanted to be a psychiatrist-. Looking back I think I wanted to try understand all of what I saw happening around me- the late 60’s were, as is said, interesting times- and there was my parents divorce. In a way, psychiatry put my parents interests- medicine and history- together. I had the privilege of going to Kenyon College, located in a small town in Ohio, where I majored in psychology, took pre-med classes, indulged my interests in history, anthropology, literature, friends, girlfriends and probably too much beer. To counter all that, I had the extraordinary opportunity to serve as an emergency medical technician and fireman on the town’s volunteer ambulance and fire department. What I saw and did on those ambulance and fire runs grounded me in ways that still resonate deeply in me. Though I knew I wanted to go to medical school, I decided to work for a year as a mental health worker to see what it was like to work in mental health care as a non-physician. I landed a job at Mclean Hospital in Boston. This was another intense and indelible experience. Among other things I served on the hospital “goon squad”, mobilized to restrain and seclude people. And I got to “do checks”, run groups and take folks on outings. For good and bad I learned a lot about psychiatric disorders and psychiatry. I was accepted into Boston University Medical School and managed to get a National Health Service Scholarship (the federal government paid my way through medical school and in return, I owed years of service to underserved communities). I found myself growing more and more concerned about the politics of health and mental health. At Boston City Hospital and in Boston’s South End the issues of social justice and health were ever present. I decided I wanted to work in the inner city so I did my residency in psychiatry in the Bronx at Jacoby Hospital and Bronx State Hospital. I became an officer on the executive committee of the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), the national house staff union. I followed this with a Post Doc Fellowship in Mental Health Services at Yale University, where I joined the faculty, working in the Connecticut Mental Health Center in New Haven and focusing on trying to aid homeless persons. Then I moved to Pittsburgh, where I have lived since 1991. I joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and threw myself into being a community psychiatrist in the inner city. I got older and new opportunities came my way. Eventually I became old enough to become the Medical Director for the Center for Mental Health Services at SAMHSA. Then that gig ended. Reciting that career trajectory doesn’t capture what really happened to me. I found my wife, my soul mate and best friend, and we made a family (three children, two dogs). I pursued a career focused on social justice and health. I worked in the streets, in shelters and jails, in community mental health centers, in homes, in medical clinics- and even state hospitals and big federal bureaucracies. I saw and tried to help folks who lived at the farthest extremes of social exclusion. I failed and I succeeded. The more I lived, the more I realized how much I had to learn- and how much I had to do that with other people, including especially the people I wanted to be helping. I grew to understand that what I could do as a psychiatrist was far more limited then I had imagined- I could not just “fix” people with talk or with medications. In fact, all I seemed to be doing was helping people tread water, at best. When I first read about the idea of recovery, I was primed. The thought that there might be more that could be gained and that there might be another way to be useful to people was a gift that I was more then ready to receive. I have been working on my recovery from my own hubris and limitations ever since. Life and teenagers help with that process. I am trying to follow all the implications that the idea of recovery generates. It’s keeping me busy.
When I got a call from Gene who told me about RI and asked me if I might be interested in a job, I knew immediately that our visions were matched. What a joy to try to learn every day how to help that vision materialize with all the extraordinary people who share this website.