Dr. Michael I. Bennett

In July 2004, Michael Bennett, then president of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, invited Marshall Forstein and me to join a task force on same-sex marriage.
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Dr. Bennett acted cautious, ultimately quite concerned about becoming a target for any anti-marriage critics. He said that he wanted to be sure we didn't enter the "political" arena and that we stuck to "concrete, observable, facts—data and science. He also had a very narrow view on what is the purview of psychiatry: psychiatrists are only expert on the "medical" ramifications of a policy and can take no position on policy vis a vis moral, ethical, and legal perspectives. In his view, psychiatrists are well advised to stick to "medicine" and not to comment on the social or ethical dimensions of any public policy issue. I was dumbfounded that Dr. Bennett and the MPS Council felt that, as psychiatrists, we had no place weighing in on the psychological effects of discrimination and prejudice on our gay and lesbian patients (and our own lives.) The biopsychosocial realm of psychiatry had been very narrowly defined, indeed. This surprised us, even more so, because it was not at all in line with the approach that the APA has taken over the past 15 years when issuing position statements on any number of issues concerning gay and lesbian rights. Dr. Bennett argued that sticking to what he called a "medical" perspective would be to make our arguments from the standpoint of our expertise and to insure that the arguments were unassailable by our foes. If we reined in our argument in this disciplined way, he argued, no one would be able to
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In the end, the only way out of our impasse was that Dr. Bennett and the Council wrote a separate position statement.

Michael I. Bennett, M.D.Immediate Past President