Dr. John Herman is Associate Chief of the Department of Psychiatry and the Distinguished Scholar for Medical Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Herman was the Chairman of the Mass. Board of Registration in Medicine, overseeing the Commonwealth's 39,000 licensed physicians and the safety and quality programs of its 200 hospitals.
In 1984, following his residency, Dr. Herman joined the staff of the MGH Psychopharmacology and Addiction clinics. For 14 years Dr. Herman directed the Department's postgraduate education division, Harvard Medical School's most successful National and International CME program. From 1991 to 2000, he was Director of Adult Psychiatry Residency Training at MGH. Dr. Herman is past President of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training.
In 1990 Dr. Herman co-founded the MGH Employee Assistance Program where he serves as Medical Director. In 1996, the EAP expanded to become the Partners HealthCare Employee Assistance Program, serving 80,000 employees and their family members.
Dr. Herman has lectured across the U.S. and internationally. His primary interest is improving access to mental health care, particularly addiction treatment. He focuses teaching efforts on helping primary care clinicians learn straightforward approaches to patients suffering psychiatric problems.
He is co-editor (with Ted Stern, MD) of the popular MGH Guide to Primary Care Psychiatry (McGraw Hill, 1998, 2003) and Psychiatry Update & Board Preparation (MGH Psychiatry Academy Publishing, 2012).
Dr. Herman grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in 1980. He served a medical internship at Brown University Medical School and a residency in Psychiatry at MGH. He lives in Newton. He and his wife have three adult children.