A T T AC H M E N T S

Attachments: My Journey Into Research and Why

I Opted for a Different Road
Judah Weathers, MD, DPhil

Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
– Robert Frost1

y hope was that through research I could improve earlier detection, prevention, and
M treatment. Perhaps I also hoped it would help me find an explanation for why my
father suffered for so many years.
One of six children, raised as a devout Jehovah’s Witness, I was taught to believe the cause
of human suffering was mankind’s inability to live in accordance with God’s rules. Primarily
through my father’s teachings as a minister in the religious organization, I was taught that the
end of the world would happen in my very own lifetime, and my prospect to live forever on
earth with my family in The New System depended on steadfast adherence to the Witness
principles. I knew early on of my purpose and was afraid to consider what could happen if I did
not stick to it.
My father was raised in a small Ohio town, where he met my mother. As children, part of
our teaching included regular family meetings where we would listen to how my father
developed his own convictions about the world, God, and religion. As far back as I can
remember, he described periods of intense depression and fear at an early age, being so terrified
of the dark, of sounds at night, and of the belief that his mother was engaging in the occult in
order to bring demons into the home just to terrorize him. The fear was so intense that he
would hide underneath his bed, night after night. At other times, sleepless and full of energy,
he recounted his glee on seeing Mickey Mouse characters leap from the sky down to the lawn
of our home.
I thought everyone’s father had the spells of energy and anger my father did. At times he
would disappear for what seemed to be months at a time into his work as an engineer. Then, the
endless late-night talks about his ability to hear God speak to him directly about what he needed
to do in order to gain access to The New System, and listening about his “expertise” in disciplines
ranging from psychology to philosophy. My siblings, my mother, and I were often awakened at
night by my father accusing us of stealing his belongings. There was no time to reconcile why
some of my siblings were in foster care.
I was about 8 at the time I can first recall one of my father’s suicide attempts. I remember the
distinct feeling of relief, maybe even of joy, that he would not be coming back home. Maybe life
would be easier for me, for my mother? Maybe he would die, and we could finally have our own
New System at home?
My father suffers from a severe form of bipolar disorder, which resulted in numerous hos-
pitalizations, suicide attempts, and treatment failures. It also contributed a tremendous amount
of stress to my development and family system. The early interventions that my siblings and

1312 www.jaacap.org Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
Volume 59 / Number 12 / December 2020
Downloaded for Fakultas Kedokteran Universitas Hasanuddin (meetingresidenpsikiatriunhas@gmail.com) at Hasanuddin University from ClinicalKey.com
by Elsevier on February 09, 2023. For personal use only. No other uses without permission. Copyright ©2023. Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 ATTACHMENTS

I were able to receive from child and adolescent mental health providers were essential to survive
such a challenging upbringing. They inspired my training to become a child and adolescent
psychiatrist.
I loved my work as a researcher. It was compelling, thought provoking, challenging, and it
connected me to a community of remarkably dedicated researchers and clinicians. I chose
research because research can lead to cures. I saw, right there on the voxels onscreen, the near-
tangible reality of my father’s illness. But after placing such precise p values on the mysteries that
haunted my childhood, I came to realize that it was time for me to leverage my training in a
different way. As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I could not wait to provide those very
interventions that might have made a difference in my father’s development.
As I considered leaving research after so many years of training, I struggled with the idea of
letting people down, including my mentors, my family, and my peers. I felt that transitioning to
a clinical career could cause irreparable damage to relationships with the very people that sup-
ported and believed in me, leaving me isolated. Leaving would mean foregoing rich academic
resources to conduct research that could—potentially, elusively—lead to treatments with an
impact on the lives of so many. Instead I opted to dedicate myself to clinical work that would
touch a significantly smaller number of people but would do so at a time-scale and community
immediacy I longed for. At the end of the day, it was those very mentors, family, and peers who
encouraged me to apply the knowledge I had gained in the way that was most fulfilling for me.
I now practice in my hometown in New Hampshire. A city with a population of some
150,000 people, Manchester is the epicenter for mental health treatment in this small state of 1
million. I work in one of the emergency rooms that my father was taken to during so many of his
crises. Each year, hundreds of patients with mood disorders flood our emergency rooms for help.
Here, I routinely work with youths who are suffering from acute psychiatric symptoms and
limited access to resources.
I did not “leave” anything. Instead, I arrived at a way of leveraging my personal story,
my training, and my love for improving the lives of youths and families in my small,
underresourced community. I am at peace.

Accepted February 27, 2020.

Dr. Weathers is with the Yale Child Study Center, New Haven, Connecticut.
The author has reported no funding for this work.
Disclosure: Dr. Weathers has received the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Klingenstein Third Generation
Foundation Award for Research in Depression or Suicide as lead author of “Longitudinal Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study of Adolescents
and Young Adults With Bipolar Disorder”, published in the February 2018 issue of the Journal.
Correspondence to Judah Weathers, MD, DPhil, Yale Child Study Center, 230 South Frontage Drive, New Haven, CT 06519; e-mail:
judah.weathers@yale.edu
0890-8567/$36.00/ª2020 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2020.02.009

REFERENCE
1. Frost R. The Road Not Taken. New York: Henry Holt and Company; 1916.

All statements expressed in this column are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of the Journal of the American
Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. See the Instructions for Authors for information about the preparation and submission of
Attachments.

Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry www.jaacap.org 1313
Volume 59 / Number 12 / December 2020
Downloaded for Fakultas Kedokteran Universitas Hasanuddin (meetingresidenpsikiatriunhas@gmail.com) at Hasanuddin University from ClinicalKey.com
by Elsevier on February 09, 2023. For personal use only. No other uses without permission. Copyright ©2023. Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.