Mark S. Komrad

MD; Faculty of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins, Sheppard Pratt, University of Maryland, USA

Mark Komrad MD is a practicing psychiatrist and medical ethicist for over 30 years. He chaired the Ethics Committee for the Sheppard Pratt Health Systems, the largest non-profit mental health care system in Maryland, for two decades. He is a clinical professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland and Tulane. He has lectured, taught and consulted in the U.S. and internationally on topics in psychiatric ethics, and published numerous articles in the field. He is a member of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Assembly and previously served 6 years on the APA Ethics Committee. In these two capacities, he helped craft and pass the new APA Position Statement finalized in December 2016:

“...a psychiatrist should not prescribe or administer any intervention to a NON-terminally ill person for the purpose of causing death.” He is now lecturing widely through the U.S., Canada, Scandanaivia, South America and Europe to address the ethical concerns that several hundred suicidal psychiatric patients in Belgium and the Netherlands are being voluntarily euthanized each year with lethal injections, typically by their own treating psychiatrists. He has consulted to policy makers in several countries trying to dissuade them from legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia or to prevent extending existing laws to include psychiatric conditions.

Dr. Komrad maintains a private practice and has a special interest in helping families convince a troubled loved one to get a psychiatric consultation, using ideas from his book You Need Help: A Step-by-Step Plan to Convince a Loved One to Get Counseling. (YouNeedHelpBook.com). He gives workshops on these ideas to mental health advocacy and support organizations throughout the country. For this work he was given the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s (NAMI’) “Exemplary Psychiatrist Award” and its “Mental Health Professional of the Year Award.” He was also host of the national radio call-in talk show about psychiatry, “Komrad On Call,” which broadcast to 43 million listeners throughout 3 the U.S and he continues to appear regularly on TV, radio, and podcasts to discuss topics in psychiatry. He has also consulted to Hollywood to help develop more ethical portrayals of psychiatrists in the movies.

Competing Interests/Conflicts of Interest: None to declare in the past year.