Kenneth Thompson MD
Chief Medical Officer, Pennsylvania Psychiatric Leadership Council;
2023
Kenneth S. Thompson, MD, graduated from Kenyon College and Boston University School of Medicine. He is a National Health Service Corps Scholar. After his psychiatric residency at the Einstein College of Medicine and postdoctoral fellowship in mental health services research at Yale he served as faculty at Yale and the University of Pittsburgh where he was the Director of the Institute for Public Health and Psychiatry. He has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Harrisburg State Hospital and the Director for Medical Affairs at the Center for Mental Health Services in SAMHSA. He is currently the Chief Medical Officer of the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Leadership Council, a unique state-level education, policy and advocacy organization he helped found. He practices in and oversees the mental health program at the Squirrel Hill Health Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center. Dr. Thompson also provides psychiatric services at Milestone Community Mental Health Center, where he is the Medical Director, the Duquesne University Psychology Clinic and the Center for Aviation Medicine. He was the PI of a recent Robert Wood Johnson Grant linking Pittsburgh and Glasgow, Scotland to develop programs and policies in pursuit of achieving health equity and sustainability. He is a Soros Physician Advocate Fellow. He is the Executive Director of Visible Hands Collaborative, a non-profit focused on promoting a public health approach to mental health by importing Integrative Community Therapy and the concept of solidarity care from Brazil to the anglophone world. Throughout his career he has focused on social medicine and community psychiatry. He has written extensively and consults and lectures globally on issues pertaining to public service, leadership and advocacy, disaster response, personal and community recovery and resiliency, whole person primary health services and mental health policy, public health and the struggle for health equity, democracy and human rights
The catalytic power of this Summit in bringing together those who are devoting their lives to pushing back and working to confront, understand and work towards solutions around hate in our society is a noble and difficult task. The Summit not only energized those who attended but led to connecting the dots in a global network of those doing this work. The stories of the victims of hate were painful to witness but their courage in coming forward was inspirational. Those who attended left energized with the hope that by working together solutions can be forged.
