Organizational Psychiatry with Dr. Daven Morrison

You know, one person said, you're only as good as your last meeting. Right. So there's this pressure to perform, to be seen as productive, to be fast, to be a person who takes action. So it's very much counter to self reflection.

Hello, I'm Dr. Farrah White.

And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner.

We're psychiatrists and therapists in private practice in New York. We started this podcast in 2019 to draw attention to a phenomenon called the Doorknob Comet. Doorknob comments are important things we all say from time to time, just as we're leaving the office, sometimes literally hand on the doorknob.

Doorknob comments happen not only during therapy, but also in everyday life. The point is that sometimes we aren't sure how to express the deeply meaningful things we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing. Maybe we're afraid to bring certain things out into the open or are on the fence about wanting to discuss them. Sometimes we know we've got something we're unsure about sharing and are keeping it to ourselves. Sometimes we surprise ourselves by what comes out.

Hi, thanks so much for tuning in to Doorknob Comments today. I'm your host, Farrah White, here with my co host, Grant Brenner, and a very special guest, David Morrison. David and I know each other through the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry, which is a sort of think tank of psychiatric, I guess, ideas and practice. And so we've known each other for a couple years now, and I would love to just hear your story. And I think a lot of people don't really know what organizational work looks like and feels like or that it's a thing that is maybe available to them. So would love to hear about that, about that development.

Well, thank you very much. I've been looking forward to conversation with you both and appreciate your concept of Doorknob moments. And I regularly use that concept in my practice. And I'll tell you about that, I'm sure, as we have a conversation. And the tie of my work actually does tie back to GAP because they both kind of have their origins in the Menager foundation and Primary Prevention, one of the original groups that started gap. And the purpose of GAP was to basically say we want to get our thoughts and ideas about psychiatry out quicker. We want to get it out to the public, we want to get it out to residents, we want to get it out to practicing psychiatrists, and we'd rather not get tied up with the APA or any journals, but we need to have a shared collective opinion, not just one Person's voice. And that's the challenge of the committees, and that's the fun and basically the strain, the pressure inside the group is to come up with a shared perspective. So we were one of the original committees at gap. It was called Psychiatry and Industry or something like that. And the idea was they were coming out of World War II. There was a lot of sense that something needed to be done with veterans. They were having trouble reintegrating in after World War II, just beginning to understand PTSD, soldiers, heart, shell shock, all that stuff. Right. We were on the cusp of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and more things were coming. And these veterans were now in the workforce. They were coming out into the workforce. So how do we put them to work? How do we think about them? Are they broken? Can they be fixed? What's their story? What is this phenomena of symptoms that we think are tied to their battle experiences? How does that relate to them as workers? A large part of what we've been exploring is what I continue to think about today is what in the workplace makes a person healthy and what perhaps makes their symptoms worse or induces pathology. A large part of the thinking around the world of work and mental health ties back to a legacy comment that Freud apparently said, but was never directly attributed to saying, which is to be mentally healthy is to be able to work and to love. And although we can't find him specifically saying that anywhere, Erik Erickson picked it up and talked about it, and then a bunch of other people have picked up and talked about the importance of work as a source for mental health. So very important to me, our practice, our little business here, is relatively uncommon in the world of primary prevention or getting out to advising or coaching, because it's mostly done by psychologists. I don't know the ratio, but it's probably something like for every one organizational psychiatrist, there's 100 organizational psychologists. And they're being. They're graduating and moving out into industry and into consulting or internally into organizations like Johnson and Johnson or Google or any of the big organizations. They have departments on the inside. But the idea came out again from Primary prevention. What is mental health? What is mental illness? And one of the original organizations that did this was also mining Gers and Miningers created this center for Applied Behavioral Sciences. And so they were active in gap, and that's what brought us together as a team. Farah, in some extent, I'll stop there and just say a little bit more about what exactly I do shortly, but is that all making sense?

So organizational psychiatry Developed in response to unmet needs, partially having to find ways to help large groups of returning veterans. My understanding is that about right?

Yes. Yeah.

My understanding is that Wilford beyond, who's a British analyst, developed group psychotherapy essentially because there weren't enough individual therapists after World War II. So he put the veterans together into a process group and he observed, like, what happened, which was really interesting. And he wrote a book about that, which is short but dense, called Experiences in Groups. And maybe we'll talk about some of what he observed and how that applies to current organizational thinking.

Yeah, no, I think if I'm tracking with you, Grant, and I don't know that history, I know the name beyond, but I think we still talk about the group defenses and what is a working group and what is a group that's defended against work. And there's three levels of it that runs from fight flight to pairing to there's one more dependent group, and I think they evolve in that direction. Is that part of what BN was describing?

That was what beyond observed and described is the difference between the basic assumption group, which you're describing, and then when the group is actually doing what it's supposed to be doing on its primary task is what he called a working group.

Yeah.

So there's a rich history there which is probably too confusing for listeners. There's a tradition in the UK called Tavistock in the US there's AK Rice, there's group relations conferences. Yeah, it's, you know, it's its own thing.

Yeah, no, that's very much integrates dovetails with what was happening at miningers. Essentially. This was kind of an experiment to sort of say, hey, we know about what makes people recover from severe symptoms. We know about what supports health. Does anybody else interested? And private industry was interested. And another group that we still work with, municipal leaders, for a variety of reasons, were interested so in particularly professional service firms, because if you think about it, bankers and accountants and others that have to work, get their work done with clients through people need to understand what supports mental health. So there was quite a lot of what would become cottage industries that they were working on back then. There was a case of sexual harassment, we'd call it today, that caused a problem in a client that brought them to miningers. There was alcoholism, there was divorce, infidelity, all the kind of stuff that there are cottage industries out now focusing on those things. Racism and so, yeah, so we still talk to those dynamics in work groups because leaders can be perplexed. Right. We're coming together we're supposed to get this task done and yet we waste our time. Or somebody has this fantastic idea and we all sit around and admire this brilliant person in our group and listen to his analysis of economics. And we don't collectively do the work that's required as a team. Not everyone's contributing people are spacing out or two people come in and they pick a fight with each other. All classic things that beyond described a long time ago still happens in these work groups. So that's part of what we're currently continue to describe and talk about. In addition, there was a kind of core bit of work that we do today that was a dream of the Minager brothers. They wanted to be like the Mayo Clinic but for psychiatry. And so one of the models that we picked up and ran with was just an idea at Mininger Foundation. And then my father left and started his own practice that came to Chicago. Ultimately was around how could we do something equivalent for mental health that the Mayo Clinic does for physical health? In other words, can we do an in depth comprehensive review of all the pressures on the individual, the financial pressures, the career pressures, the marital pressures, the legal pressures, all the things that are coming down on an executive so that they could then feel like they are understood and if possible, develop a plan for them and then go forward in kind of a trusted business advisor on getting their needs met, related to their career and often, as is the case, their ability to lead a team or work better with their boss. So those concepts that were just kind of back of a napkin ideas are now something we've been doing for 50 years. We have roughly 3,000 executives who've come through this and we've added specific assessments onto this and processes related to interviewing around their life at work and their life outside of work. So that's been really rewarding and what clients appreciate. There's more to that story I can share shortly, but the idea of, hey, just like you have a family history of coronary artery disease and alcoholism, come to the Mayo Clinic, we'll get the specialist, check you out, we'll tell you your relative risk factors, we'll come up with a plan so you can have some peace of mind and go back and focus for IBM or Craft or Motorola, whatever your organization is. We wanted to do the same thing for mental health.

And who is we?

So the practice was originally spun out of the center for Applied Behavioral Sciences, or cabs, which was this group in mining years by my father. It started in the basement of our house in Topeka. Cool. I Didn't know that his first employee beyond an executive assistant was helping him with, believe it or not, overheads with Jill and some large poster board things that he would carry around to make his presentations. Long before PowerPoint was actually my mom who was an MBA. So they were, they came to Chicago on behalf of Continental Bank. Continental bank had done some work with miningers and they had sort of engaged him in a couple of concerns. In fact, they don't exist anymore. But in fact, part of one of the things that they were working on is they came out of, you know, the 1960s, 1970s, and were mainly wealthy white people who were banking and bankers. And they had some problems with racism at the time. So that was one of the early projects is how do you, how do you basically open your mind to seeing people beyond their, their race? And as you both probably know, there's some significant history of racism here in Chicago, which is where Continental bank was based. That was an early, like I was saying, these are now cottage industries. That was an early kind of DEI program or harassment program to build, designed to open people's eyes, to let them be a little bit more self aware about how they see and talk about others. But stress was another important one. The banking hours at that time was actually very reasonable. You come in at 9, you leave at 3, you take long weekends whenever you want. You could have five or six martinis for lunch. It was a different era. People smoked cigars in wood paneled offices back in the day. So before email and smartphones, there were other stresses and pressures on them that obviously progress through today. So the next part of the story as it related to the individual assessments beyond the organizational consulting and advising, was this concept of judgment. One of our clients was a really interesting organization called CF Industries. They're the world's largest fertilizer manufacturing. And it was fascinating because their board of directors was also their customers. Their board of directors was a cooperative of farmers from around the US and then North America and now the world. And basically the executives were coming through and the CEO came first. And after a point he's like, you know, these are expensive and I'd like to get a little bit more for what I'm paying. So he said, tell me about their judgment and their ability to handle stress. So it was at that point in the late 80s, I think mid to late 80s, we started to organize our consulting around judgment. And that came to your point that you were talking about earlier, Farrah, that sort of highlighted the idea that the individual executives are not our clients. The organization is our client. And so that can be important for clarity. For example, when they come through at the beginning of the day, we make it very clear we're not making, making a psychiatric diagnosis. We're not here to diagnose you. We want to understand you as a leader. If something comes up, we're experienced, you know, we're trained as physicians and psychiatrists. We will find a resource for you and we'll be very private. I like to tease them that we were HIPAA as psychiatrists before anyone else was hipaa. So most people know hipaa. So, yeah, so that's bringing us up kind of to the modern day. And so in addition to reviewing the pressures and doing some assessments about their intellect and their personality, we also add a 360 that integrates the perspective of others in the workplace. And was just talking about that today. In terms of how do we define success? What role, if any, do these factors play? And as I'm sure you both know as experienced clinicians, the results of the actual tests, the performance on the tests don't matter as much as the person's awareness of how they perform and where and when do those matter. So there are some tests that measure the relative capacity to function in ambiguity. There's other tests that measure the capacity to read emotions, and those are important in certain contexts. But it's also important that there's other colleagues that can kind of fill in your blind spots, so to speak, and you build the team around who you are versus who you think you are.

What are the most common organizational problems that we see? Is there some sort of list of organizational diagnoses or something?

I can tell you, Grant, some of the top concerns right now. And then I also have a. I'll tell you about the individuals, sort of turn the question around a little bit and talk about concerns for the individual executives that are sent to see us. One of the things that happen in organizations, as I'm sure you know, is downsizing, rightsizing, mergers and acquisitions, kind of change the culture, the expectation, the power dynamics in the organization. One group that I was working with was here in Motorola was their legacy automotive division. And it's kind of fun. But the word Motorola comes from the combination of motor and Victrola. The idea being that Bob Galvin wanted to hear the radio in his car and there was too much electronic interference from the firing of the pistons. So the first engineering thing that he wanted to do that was not for the US army or something like that, was for the public. It was a Motorola Car radio, that was a legacy business, very proud of it. Lots of different solutions, electronic solutions they were bringing to the cars. Well, that group got acquired by a German company and their headquarters are here. And I was working with one of their leaders and he's like, I don't want to go to Germany again. I've been there before. I want to be a coach like you. So he and I worked together and he's now a successful advising leadership advising coach. He says the number one thing for leaders is actually self awareness. So this inability to perceive how you come across and the harm if you're doing well. Right. It's not a problem. They don't need to come see somebody like me or him. But it's when they screw up and they're insensitive or they're tone deaf or they're pushy or whatever. So it's kind of a large, huge bucket of different ways. But the common denominator is a lack of being aware of how they're coming across that self awareness. And then as it relates to organizations right now there are two, maybe three big ones. Obviously artificial intelligence is a really big one right now in terms of how is that going to impact white collar jobs in particular, but also just the relative production of materials. Right. It can take a split second to draft a memo, an internal minimum or a new policy which might have occupied somebody's afternoon back in the day. They would have taken half a day to work on these things. And then the relative concern about accuracy and hallucinations and all of that kind of stuff. The other big one is are we working in the building, are we working at home and who gets to work at home and when? So that's, that's a hot one right now. And then the administration honestly is an important one because of a couple of my clients are getting whipsawed by these tariffs. They don't know what's coming next, how to anticipate, where to put their people, where to put their plants, where to put their money. It's all, there's a lot of uncertainty, unpredictability. Yeah, it's anxiety provoking. So those are the hot ones right now. But they're also kind of consistent themed through time, which is new technology, economic forces that come unexpected, the drive for growth. We've got to be bigger, faster, more successful than our competitors. So those are, those are perennial problems.

And do you find, let's say long time clients of yours are those types of decisions things that they want your input on or. Not so much.

There's a couple of different buckets they fall into. One is, would be I really know what I want to have happen and why won't these damn people do what the f I want them to do, Right? There's those guys and gals and then there's the people that are kind of like, you know, I just need to hang on for another five years so I can get my ex. I'm sure you're familiar with them, Farah, you probably YouTube grant that I need to get to 55, I need to get to 60, I need to somehow you know, endure. And then there's a couple people currently that are on the other side of that 10 or 15 years back from that. They're kind of in the, the making hay part of their career that don't necessarily know what their passion is. They've been promoted, they're good at what they do, but they need, they need to discover. So it's in the dialogue with their story. Sort of they using me to kind of. I see my role as kind of be a sounding board back to them.

So how come they're not more self reflective? What happened to them?

That's a great question, Grant. I'll tell you.

No offense.

Yeah, no, they're not. They're generally not. I'll tell you a common story and it may be very biased by the kind of people that come to work with me. So there may be a whole set of people that aren't like this, but a lot of the successful professional service firm people that come to us did not have much money and they've been very successful because they gsd. They get shit done. Right. Sorry, I don't know if I can swear on this, but yeah, yeah, they get stuff done and they come out of a hunger. You know, maybe it wasn't when they first started. Maybe it was, you know, two blue collar parents or single parents, but at some point there was a hunger. Right. Are we going to be able, are we going to have to move again? Did mom or dad lose their job again?

And that entails a fair amount of emotional numbing or compartmentalization as well.

Yeah, yeah. There's, there's an issue of also, aren't you guys seeing this? Why can't you figure this out? Parents. And I don't ever want to be worried again about not paying the rent. So that's not an uncommon senior executive story that then gets to. What frame of mind are they in when they get to college or as they go through high school? Right. I'm not taking Any BS class on philosophy or the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire or the Great Sonnets of Shakespeare, because that's not going to get me a job, you know, I'm not going to get a job with this bullshit. So it's a waste of time. So you don't have those seminar kind of experiences where you sit and wonder, you know, about just a line in a poem or.

Those things are very human.

They miss that. You know, I'm overstating the story, but that's one dynamic. And then they get to the workplace and it's, you know, one person said you're only as good as your last meeting. Right. So there's this pressure to perform, to be seen as productive, to be fast, to be a person who takes action. So it's very much counter to self reflection. Now there are those who do it well and that pays off over time. But you know, that gets ridiculed. Imagine you've heard this navel gazing or Kumbaya. You know, it's, it's quickly they want to stuff. Yeah, they want to categorize this and dismiss it, make fun of it.

Do you ever do what is sometimes called parts work? Like I've noticed that with a lot of high performers there's like a part of them that's dismissive like this. And over time sometimes there can be the development of a more meta sort of meta awareness, like broad based understanding of oneself where people will start to see like, like that part of me doesn't give a hoot about anything, doesn't care if I didn't sleep, doesn't care if I didn't eat, doesn't, you know, just whatever it takes to get the job done and is often very, very critical and almost abusive internal kind of voice. And the motivation is often based in this abusive type of relationship pattern that may have been internalized early in life and often plays out in their personal relationships. I think you would agree that a lot of times the hypertrophy, the over development of the work identities deeply interferes with intimacy, particularly as. Right. Intimacy involves a certain level of emotional self awareness and so on. So I'm wondering how many of your clients come in and also, yeah, look at what's happening in their personal lives or whether there's overuse of alcohol which can be common in certain industries. And you know, how much traction do you find? I found that the development of this type of awareness may be very quick on an intellectual level, but the emotional development can lag far behind the intellect, which can be frustrating for Someone who's trying to perform.

I agree with all of that. Right. I mean, one of the interesting insights came out of a weekend on Judgment at Kellogg. It was kind of fun because it made me feel good about being a Spanish major. But I went to Northwestern as an undergrad and one of the most popular courses. It was strange. I couldn't figure it out until kind of looking back on it 20 years later was Russian Literature. And it's still popular today. And so I did my spiel on Executive Judgment and measuring it and the story that you guys have heard, but right before me was the current professor. It's now like been taught for 40 years, maybe 50 years, and back to the Cold War maybe, who still teaches Russian literature. And part of what he talks about in that class, and this ties back to my tactics, is when you read a good piece of literature, you're almost forced to think about what would I do in that situation? Or what was it like to be them? What was it like to be Anna Karenina? You know, what was it like to be somebody in War and Peace or Dostoevsky's brother?

I often wonder what it's like, what it would have been like to be Raskolnikov.

Who is that?

Isn't he one of the. Oh, no, I mean, do I mean Rasputin? I might mean Rasputin.

That could be. That could be. I'm not a master of Russian literature. I took the course a long time ago, but I don't remember.

That's the only thing I know about Russian literature.

Rasputin, the guy that whispers in the ear of somebody.

I think Ras Kolnikov was in Crime and Punishment. Okay, he's one of these bad guys. Or I guess he was a good guy anyways. I'm sorry to digress. Well, no, that's relate to organizational.

And that ties to your question because how do we break this cycle of achievement? And a lot of times it's this freaking guy is blocking me or why don't they give me the resources I want? And so part of what I do that they know, particularly because many of them have had to have some sales responsibility. But what's in it for them? Right with them. What's in it for me? So part of what I offer that begins to bring some self awareness is what's it like to be that person? What's it like to be that person when you take this tactic? So that drive that you described that can be moralistic, can be very harsh, is what we call a harsh superego or there's ways we measure and talk about that in our, in our testing and then our processes and then we look for data for it in the 360. It's very common. It's roughly four fifths of the executives that come through. We tend to see it come out in one of two ways. It comes out like it's hard to work for this boss. He's never happy, you know, he's an asshole. Or they take work back. They never let me do anything because the only one that can do it perfect is them. So, yeah, it's quite, quite common. So what happens, right, you start talking about that, you start coming up with plans. What are you going to do different when you go back to the office on Monday? What are you going to do different when you go on your email tonight? Get very concrete with them.

Stop being a sociopath.

Yeah, stop. Stop being. Well, stop. Yeah. Stop being driven by this sense of perfection. Because it doesn't have to be perfect everywhere. We, we agree to that. Right. I mean we've walked through that already.

So find self compassion is often a critical idea.

Yes.

Because a lot of the way they treat other people is what they expect from themselves and that can be used to rationalize these transgressions.

Yeah, yeah. And that's also the sense of the. Not quite narcissism, but just the sense that my department or my child or my wife is a reflection or my husband is a reflection of me and they need to be perfect and they need to do everything right. So. Yeah. One other example of it spilling from work back to all parts of their life was kind of interesting. It's coming to an end. It's about a 10 year story and the person is rotating off and the successor's coming on. It's been a really neat consultation, but I found that most important thing that I thought he ought to work on was giving more structure to the people that he worked with because he did really well in ambiguity and things were clear to him, but he needed to be more clear, need to slow down and be specific. But I always let them work on whatever they find motivating and we watch and see. So he came back within a month or two and this was on a phone call. So he's in Chicago and then we're doing these phone calls to check in and see if he's making progress. He was stressed, his boss son was overly stressed and he was just tight as a snare drum. So the point was to help him get more support from work or basically not be so tense and overwhelmed. So he, he came back, he said he's Tar Heels fan. So he came back after the March Madness and he said, hey, David, I just noticed something. I think I should be working on hyper competitiveness because I was watching my team go through the March Madness and as they started to lose, I got more and more agitated to where I was yelling at the phone on television. And I, and I realized as I got louder and louder, the family scattered to corners of the house to get away from me. And he said, as I thought about it, right, the, the, the, the, the inklings, the beginnings of self awareness. I calmed down and I asked them about it and they're like, dad, yeah, you should knock it off. It's not pleasant to be around you or honey, you know, it's, I, I'd like to watch the game with you, but it's miserable. So, yeah, those are, those are times where we were looking, right, specifically at changing things at work to decrease the stress. But he wasn't getting the nurturance at home either, because there's something I wasn't even planning on. But he took it, ran with it, and that was actually the beginning of a really strong, what would become a really strong working alliance with him.

I think a lot of folks with these sorts of problems inadvertently are intimidating to people in their personal lives. And it seems for the people in their personal lives that their everyday concerns are just not that important. And I think you can draw a parallel back to combat veterans who, if they have ptsd, which you can sort of have from a very neglected, deprived, abusive childhood, that everyday things just don't seem to matter very much compared to like needing to, you know, make your numbers by the fourth quarter or whatever, because in a sense, business starts to feel like war and nothing else matters.

I think we see that a lot in all areas where things, the intensity on things, and that means academics or parenting, home relationships, work seems to have been turned up. And I don't know if we feel like social media or LinkedIn, if there is too much stuff, sort of proximity and competition where it feels like these relationships, maybe there's, there's an overload, right, of what other people are doing or thinking about how we measure up. I don't know that we're meant to have front row seats to everyone else's like, you know, parenting struggles or work, you know, successes. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Oh, Farrah, that's so, so important. I've been thinking about something like that since I had to give up My flip phone for a smartphone. Personally, when was that? I did not want the email entering my life. And then I have a close friend, he's been very successful. He had a similar experience with wi fi on airplanes. There were certain pockets of our world where work could not get us. That was actually the source of our logo, work, family and self. Because the original burned out people were city managers who felt like they were living in a fishbowl. Most municipalities require resident living. You have to live in the city that you work in. So this is now like almost 50 years old. But the idea was they couldn't get away because people would corner them at the grocery store or the football game and say I need a stop sign on my street or crime is going up or there's a pothole or the water bill is too much, whatever it might be. They couldn't escape when they should be allowed to kind of walk amongst us anonymously. Right. So yeah, I think that. Front row seat. Boy, that's a great metaphor. I just wrote about this actually today. I'll send you a link medium with Karen. You know Karen? Yeah, she, she was driving this more than me, Farah. But she talked about the loneliness of the Gen Z and the sadness of Gen Z and the way that we as parents feel it too. And so one of the readers said let's flip this and talk about what it's like to be a parent of Gen Z. Maybe you saw this as well, but David Brooks just wrote an article a week or so ago about the most rejected or generation. Very painful article to read about the amount of places the Gen Z generation apply to and get rejected from. So the odds of getting into Harvard. Right. The odds of getting into University of Illinois used to be all you had to do was apply and get into your state school and then of course the competition for academics, but also school sports and music and other things and then getting into the job world. So yeah, I, I don't know what to do about it. I imagine you both as clinicians are seeing it. Part of what we wanted to emphasize is the idea of a healthy bond, you know, a safe place to come back to and not being a, a, a project manager as a parent, but just a parent parent that you just love them, you know, whatever they do and, and that could include telling them to get their act together and do their homework. But it's about them as a person unto themselves, not as an extension of me and not as. The other thing I think is, I think you both know is the contagion of emotion. And if you've ever been out at. Because I felt it. My sons are, you know, good. They weren't fantastic, but they were good at soccer. So they got into some kind of elite clubs. And there's a contagion of competition that you just walk up to the sideline and start talking. You know, who's getting playing time, who's getting moved up, what is required to. For this team to advance to the next level, who's coming to watch, to scope them out from the Olympic team or the Chicago Fire team. You know, that crap is like a emotional contagion to the whole group. So I think that it's sort of.

Basic dominance stuff, like one upsmanship and status dynamics. And in Western culture, and US culture in particular is, you know, known for having this relationship with work, you know, that you can make fun of. Like Europeans and some other cultures are very, very performance oriented. Some Eastern cultures where that's almost like a moral imperative to succeed materially. Our culture is also, as you keep suggesting, dominated by the sports mentality, which is, which is very much how people are conditioned. I think a lot of people who are successful in the corporate world started off in elite athletics. And it's very much like the team works together. There's an eye on the ball. The ball is a KPI or a metric. And like that's kind of all that matters until something happens right. Later on in life, you see that. The generational issue, I think, is fascinating with Gen Z and Gen AI more, I think more and more there are leaders who are Gen Xers. I'm a Gen Xer. I was born in 1970. And you know, we, yeah, and we, we always brag that no one took care of us.

Right, right.

Like, you know, they let us out and then we came back when the street lamps came on and it was dangerous or if you didn't have a parent at home. We were called latchkey kids. I was a latchkey kid and okay, I never lose my keys to this day. And so I think that can cut against the parenting where you're kind of like, you guys are whiny. By the same token, the kids today are like smartphone kids if we were latchkey kids. And that's, I think, part of, you know, what you're describing, like ensuring that there's that basic human bond. Yeah, of course. You see more and more parents on their phones. They call it fubbing when someone is ignoring someone else, you know, snubbing them with their phones. And you see all these parents and nannies who are just like on their phones and the kid is on their phone. To your point about AI, right, the attachment becomes primarily to technology rather than to other humans.

Right? Yeah. No, in fact, I'll make another. You've heard about two of the world's kind of organizational consultation, individual consultation. We do another thing, but just focus for city managers because they're here locally, they can drive over to our office. Right. And there's a lot of municipalities around Chicago. So we have four or five groups, standing groups, and we open it with what's hot and that's where we go from there. Free flowing. They, they contribute their best practices. But me and our other group leaders are all about the interpersonal. So we've been pretty harsh about putting your phone away. Not like, you know, ruthless Nazis. One guy is diabetic so he needs to kind of keep his eye on it. But it's seductive. Right. Is he really looking at his diabetes or what else is on his phone that he's checking out? Right. But it's nice because it's a. It's now becoming. One of them is. Well, one of them is very old. It goes back to the mid-70s. The North Shore city managers, the newer one is only about 20, 25 years old and they're now self enforcing the fact that you don't have your phone out. But it was hard to start. The fricking things are so addictive and we wanted them to not feel judged. And of course they don't feel competent going for two hours without fiddling on their phones. So I tend to leave my phone in my office as much as I can. So I'm not doing it. One of my co leaders is hard of hearing, so he has it as his hearing aid. Anyways, those are the hard things about focused attention. There are certain problems you cannot solve. What distracted or Fractured Attention Strategies 1, Performance Appraisals, Performance conversations are another intense group work when you're dealing with a crisis is another. So those are kind of things that in fact we've had police shootings in our municipalities and they come back to the capacity to focus and to use good judgment that they learn from these groups. So it's cool stuff.

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. I think we got, we touched on a lot of, you know, the hallmarks of organizational psychiatry. And I know that we could talk forever. But if people want to learn more about you and what you're doing, where can they find you?

Well, obviously through our writings and gap with my colleague Farah White. But yeah, no, morrisonassociateslimited.com is our website and then we also do work if these are psychiatrists listening. The Academy of Organizational Occupational Psychiatry is a targeted group where we talk once a month on Saturdays about cases people are being pulled into. A lot of times the psychoanalytic institutes or the Department of Psychiatry get consulted about workplace issues. I'd like for psychiatrists to be more representative because we know a lot more about some parts of the workplace that psychologists don't. The neurology, the substance abuse, the other health concerns that can impact somebody's work performance. Psychologists don't have an MD And I think that gives us a competitive way we approach problems. The SOAP method, the follow up, the ongoing care. Well, the psychologists, the clinical psychologists have that. But yeah, I would love to see. If you're listening, contact me. There's a couple of different ways that we can get more people doing organizational psychiatry. If you're a psychiatrist.

Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask that. Maybe that's a brief follow up. How could a psychiatrist who's interested in organizational work actually get involved? Any quick notes on that?

Yeah, I think one of the early toe in the water kind of steps is a thoughtful getting interested and involved in returning to the workplace or workplace disability. I think a lot of times psychiatrists assume they know what's going on in the workplace. But getting up off your butt and walking into the building, getting on an airplane and going to see headquarters, that comes later. But if you can begin to not think as the person's, not think as the person's therapist or doctor. But I want to now advocate on behalf of the organization to get this person to work as effectively and happily as possible. That's a different stance and that's the beginning of it. And then when you can do that, obviously I think where we started to grant with the beyond models thinking about teams and systems rather than individuals. We're not looking for Kaiser flies or rings. We're looking for group dynamics so that that can be quick and you're welcome in and invited to do more often and you can figure those things out and what's in it for. For them, you know what's in it for me? Getting them to be more self aware and recognizing. I listen to you as a psychiatrist. It helps me and my career. That's a big shot in the main vein, so to speak.

Thanks so much.

Well, you're very welcome. It's been an honor to be with you.

Remember the doorknob comments podcast is not medical advice. If you may be in need of professional assistance. Please seek consultation without delay.