Robert C. Smith M.D.

Robert C. Smith, M.D. is a general internist and a University Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at Michigan State University. He also is a Master of the American College of Physicians. His teaching and research focus on patient-centered communication and primary care mental health. He has been featured on The Today Show as well as interviewed in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Elle, Ladies Home Journal, Time, and Newsweek on training doctors to establish better doctor-patient relationships, chronic pain, and mental health problems in medical settings.

He is also the author of a bestselling interviewing textbook, Smith’s Patient-Centered Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Method (McGraw-Hill)—the 4th edition was published in August 2018. A second textbook—Essentials of Psychiatry in Primary Care: Behavioral Health in the Medical Setting (McGraw-Hill) was published in May 2019.

His next book, Has Medicine Lost Its Mind? Why Our Mental Health System Is Failing Us and What Should Be Done to Cure It, will be published by Prometheus Books as one of their lead Spring issues in March 2025. The book describes America’s severe mental health crisis and why it occurred. It then shows exactly what needs to be done and presents a surefire political mechanism to ensure that change actually occurs.

This blog will explore how mental health care in the U.S. lags far behind medical care and how the failure to train physicians in mental health care worsens or creates many of the problems we hear about on a daily basis, including the opioid epidemic, suicide, and our failures in managing chronic pain and depression. We’ll also address some of the broader societal issues, such as the shortage of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, the tremendous financial cost of deficient mental health care, and how we will need to proceed as a society to improve mental health care.