We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Grant Brenner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Grant below.

Alright, Grant thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

My professional aspirations started early. In elementary school I wanted to be a scientist. However, the defining moment for me was finding books on the psychology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the Livingston mall’s bookstore in the early 1980s. I consume them along with quite a bit of anthropology, psychology, philosophy of mind, complexity, neuroscience, and related work on psychotherapies.

My mother passed away when I was 9 years old after a prolonged battle with cancer. I was left with a strong sense of mission to help people. Although my course meandered—after forays into Physics and Surgery, ultimately, I completed training in General Adult Psychiatry and went on to get trained as a psychoanalyst, and organizational consultant. I also became very involved in philanthropic work in disaster mental health, working on both systemic and local levels.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

And keeping with my early sense of wonder, intellectual curiosity, and desire to help people I have done a lot of different things.

I maintain a private practice where I treat people with Psychotherapy medications and emerging modalities including transcranial magnetic stimulation. Providing procedural treatments in Psychiatry harkens back to my experience during General Surgery, in which I trained for 2 years prior to Psychiatry. I like being able to see things from every possible point of view.

In 2014 I started a company which I exited in 2022. I earned my “unofficial MBA” cutting my teeth in a startup reality. I learned so much about how to manage myself, as well as how the world really works. As I had trained in organizational psychodynamics, but only witnessed it in the not-for-profit space doing very mission-based philanthropic work on a shoestring, it was an eye-opening experience to grow a business with an in-network reimbursement model for mental health.

Coming from a family of teachers and a cultural tradition of trying to do good in the world, I found myself also teaching consistently over the years in the hospital and other programs, subjects like Psychotherapy and the neurobiology of trauma. And I found I had a taste for public communication.

Writing a Blog for psychology today has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and my ExperiMentations Blog has over 14 million views now. I’ve also been doing a podcast called Doorknob Comments for 5 years with my colleague and co-host and have found that to be an incredible learning experience. There’s such a need for people in the public to get better information about mental health and well-being, but there’s so much bad information.

Co-writing three book series on dysfunctional relationships has been incredible as well. We started our Irrelationship series with a treatise, How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy. The second book is called Relationship Sanity and is for couples. The third book is called Making Your Crazy Work For You: From Trauma and Isolation to Self-Acceptance and Love. That book is for individuals to work on internal relationships within oneself.

I’m also involved in a project to use media and the arts to raise awareness about mental health and have co-organized two film festivals. I’m looking forward to growing that—the Mental Health Media Group.

Disaster mental health work has also been very rewarding. I co-chair a think tank committee on Disasters, Trauma and Global Health with the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) and sit on the board of Vibrant Emotional Health where I serve as an advisor for Disaster Services. We are developing a system for being able to make sense of and provide a response framework for the increasingly complex, frequent, and severe disasters we are seeing around the world: the Model for Adaptive Response to Complex Cyclical Disasters, or MARCCD. Our GAP Committee just revised a textbook on Disaster Psychiatry: Readiness, Evaluation and Treatment, and I was privileged to be one of the co-editors.

It may sound like I never have any free time but that’s not true. I spend a lot of time on social media and with my family, and I also really, really enjoy photography. I’ve always had a creative Pursuit whether it be painting poetry music or nowadays photography which combines both the art and the technology. Most of what I do is street art though it depends how much time I have and whether I’m traveling but given that I live in New York and walk to work, it’s a great way to have rich experience every day of being outside and active as well as creative and looking for hidden gems that we may not usually notice.

The two big pieces of advice I would give people aside from generally following what’s meaningful if you are lucky enough to have the option, is to practice self-compassion and to make sure to nurture your creative side. Having a great relationship with yourself is the most important thing in some ways. This is not to take away from relationships with others, because they inevitably go hand in hand, but so many get along very well with others and don’t extend the same kindness to themselves.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I vividly remember the day when I realized that despite my love of the practice of Surgery, I knew that ultimately it wouldn’t work for me for two reasons. First, it was having an undeniably toxic effect on my personality and relationships. A good friend told me so, an act of courage and kindness I’ve kept with me.

The second thing is that my deepest love was a sense of wonder about the natural world and the human experience. I knew that it wouldn’t be right for me, nor would it be right for my patients, to stick with a surgical field where no doubt I could have done a lot of good but important parts of me would have been left out.

I was lucky because I always had this spark within me. My earliest memory is looking at the sun shining through the trees and being absolutely awestruck. But about the natural beauty and not anything supernatural. The other early memory which stands out is deciding around the age of three that it was time to break out of my crib. I remember reaching out through the bars and pulling an ornate French design step stool with gilded spirals on the side over to the edge, climbing up and making my break.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

So many things are helpful. If I must choose two today, I’m going to say compassion for oneself and others, and being open-minded. It’s important not to let the bad stuff in life pull you down too far. It’s also important to be able to make use of—to learn from—adversity. Naïve focus on positivity is dangerous, and we have at times to stare unwavering, with “direct eyes” to quote TS Eliot, at things we don’t like about ourselves, each other, and the world.

Perhaps most of all, my sense of humor has carried me through. A sense of humor is a great tool for dealing with uncertainty as long as you also stay focused on moving forward and prevent grim humor from being a burden to oneself and on relationships.

Even if you’re stuck, being present with being stuck is paradoxically a way to move forward. I truly believe that everything important happens in the present moment, but I don’t mean that in a simplistic way. The present moment is unfathomably complex, despite its ephemeral nature. And the decisions we make from moment to moment shape the past, present and future.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.granthbrennermd.com
• Instagram: @granthbrennermd.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/19iMgKK75g/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grant-h-brenner-md-dfapa
• Twitter: @granthbrennermd.com
• Other: https://linktr.ee/DrGrantHBrennerhttps://ghbrenner.picfair.com/

Image Credits

The images are all credited to me