Robert Sain MD

Summary

• I've been practicing community child psychiatry in southeastern Michigan before and since 1985 when I finished the Fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the U of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Denver General Hospital, Arnold Silverman told us that we learn primarily from our patients and not from books.
  
  This premise has guided my work with juvenile offenders, victims of child abuse and neglect, emotionally and learning disabled children, and the many children I continue to meet who, with their parents, find themselves behind the 8-ball.
  All of these children become adults with "mental illnesses" who are incarcerated without the benefit of appropriate treatment. Others are children in families, neighborhoods, and schools that are inept to create therapeutic contexts that optimize emotional growth.
  
  Following 22 years of residential treatment of seriously delinquent adolescents, I learned how to help many of them move towards self-governance ... Tocqueville in Democracy in America 1830-1835 defined individuals as self-governing if they were able to define and to act responsibly in working for their own self-interest AND, at the same time, consider the welfare of their fellow citizens (achieve a capacity for empathy).
  
  I've learned that ANY setting in which children find themselves can be enhanced by (1) understanding the dynamics of that setting and by (2) making self-conscious changes within that setting to address the obstacles to creative solutions to resolve the resistance to helping troubled or troubling children within those settings.
  
  Bottom line, to change agents, such as myself, it's simple to diagnose patients. But we don't help diagnoses ... we consider the problems which our patients present to us ... and then take the time to help them resolve their problems.
  
  This takes considerable time is working psychotherapeutically with hundreds of children and having the benefit of experienced colleagues from whom they can learn.