How did you become interested in studying psychology, and especially issues relating to men’s mental health?
Professor Addis: I grew up in a family of psychologists. My father was a social psychologist and our shelves were full of psychology books. I picked up Freud and browsed through that, and by the time I got to college, I knew that I was interested in becoming a clinical psychologist and working with people directly in a clinical setting. Then I went to grad school, and realized I had a real passion for doing research, writing, scholarship and teaching, in addition to the clinical work. When I was finishing up grad school I spent a year working in an inpatient unit in a psychiatric hospital, where people come when they have crises in their lives. Often people would come in after they’d made an unsuccessful attempt to take their life. Each morning the clinicians would gather as a team and go through the records of the people who’d come in the night before. On one particular morning, I was struck by a man who had attempted to take his life, and had no psychiatric history at all. There was
