2015 DOCTORS’ BALL PHYSICIAN HONOREES
Dr. Jesse Wright
22
EXCELLENCE IN MENTAL HEALTH
P
sychiatrist Dr. Jesse Wright, founder and director of the University
of Louisville Depression Center, has made it his life’s work to reach
the many adults with mood disorders who do not have access to
adequate mental health treatment. He’s trained hundreds of mental health
practitioners in Louisville and worldwide, developed groundbreaking online psychotherapy programs, and over more than 40 years, worked with
individual patients to re-build lives with a sense of well being.
After medical school at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, the
central Pennsylvania native did a psychiatry residency at the University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and found it fascinating. “There were so many
questions, so much that needed to be done,” he says, for people suffering
from mental illness in the pre-Prozac era of the 1960s and ‘70s when treatment was often institutionalized and relied on medicines like Thorazine
with heavy side effects. If therapy took place at all, it generally took the
form of Freudian psychoanalysis for the few who could afford it.
Then Wright met the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Aaron Beck,
considered the father of cognitive-behavior therapy, which guides patients
to identify and control thinking, emotions and behaviors. Beck inspired
Wright to develop new therapeutic strategies and new ways of delivering
them. In the process, Wright, who also earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychopharmacology at the University of Louisville, became one of the world’s
experts in cognitive-behavior therapy.
Thirty-six years ago, Wright was the first doctor Dr. David Casey worked
with as a third year student at the U of L School of Medicine. Now Professor
and Interim Chair in the U of L Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Casey recalls Wright’s ability to help difficult patients with
characteristic calm focus and equanimity. Despite the advent of effective
antidepressants, Wright says, “Most people want a comprehensive approach
where they believe the doctor is really listening to them.”
In establishing the U of L Depression Center, one of only 24 such centers
nationwide, Wright says, “We’re trying to do for mood disorders what
cancer centers have done for cancer – remove stigma, educate the public,
develop better treatments and train clinicians.” Wright’s books on cognitive therapy have been translated into other languages for use in training
programs around the world.
Dr. Wright continues to advance psychiatric treatment by leveraging
the reach of technology for therapy. Along with his mentor, Dr. Beck, and
Wright’s son, University of Washington surgeon Dr. Andrew Wright, Wright
has developed Good Days Ahead, an interactive multimedia program that
teaches people cognitive-behavior therapy skills to combat depression
and anxiety. Clinical trials indicate it achieves good results even without
medication, and is as effective as face-to-face interaction with a therapist.
With or without technology, Wright says, “Every day is a fresh and
challenging day because each patient has his own story.” All his pursuits
– literature, art, philosophy, acting, singing and traveling the world with
his wife, Suzanne – inform his work, helping him understand, he says,
“what it is to be human.”
LOUISVILLE MEDICINE