Francis G. Lu, M.D.
Professor of Clinical Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco
U.S.A.

I was born in San Francisco of Chinese immigrant parents in 1949. My father, born in 1916 near Shanghai, had obtained a medical degree at Tonjii University and came to the US to study pharmacology at Stanford. My mother, born in 1922 in Canton, came to study history. But the Chinese revolution made it unsafe for them to return, so they married and remained in the United States.

I grew up in New Jersey and Maryland as an only child and often the only Asian child in the schools I attended. Although my parents held onto Confucian values, I was more of a fast assimilator. I graduated from Columbia College, Dartmouth Medical School, and the Mt. Sinai (NY) psychiatry esidency program. While psychiatry residency training at that time was devoid of cultural issues, I had the good fortune of having as a supervisor Gerald Epstein, MD, who opened my eyes to transpersonal psychology.

After completing residency training, I moved to San Francisco, in 1977, partially to have more opportunities to learn about these perspectives. In May 1978, I attended a five-day residential seminar at Esalen Institute on "Hinduism and Buddhism in Oriental Art" given by Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of mythology. This seminar led to a transformative epiphany; it convinced me that my purpose in life was to bring together in some way the East and the West.

Since 1977, I have been an inpatient clinician, educator, and administrator in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). As a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, I have recruited, supervised, and mentored a generation of residents and junior faculty. I have also provided leadership for cultural competence and diversity at UCSF/UC, the California Department of Mental Health, SAMHSA Center for Mental Health Services the Office of the Surgeon General, HHS Office of Minority Health, HRSA, SAMHSA Center for Mental Health Services, the California Endowment, the Templeton Foundation, APA, and other professional organizations.

I am also the Director of the Cultural Competence and Diversity Program, Department of Psychiatry, San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). SFGH is the only acute care public hospital in San Francisco and cares for the City's MediCal, MediCare, and indigent population that are largely ethnic minority. Almost all the patients are initially involuntarily committed and severely mentally ill, often with concomitant substance abuse disorders. The inpatient programs also serve as cultural and public psychiatry training sites for medical students, psychiatry residents, and trainees of other disciplines.

In 1980, I founded the Asian Focus Psychiatric Inpatient Program, which served as a model for five other programs serving Black, Latino, women, gay/lesbian and HIV patients. In 1987, the APA awarded these programs a Certificate of Significant Achievement. In 1991, UCSF awarded three SFGH Department of Psychiatry faculty, including myself, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for "extraordinary leadership and inspiration in furthering the goal of achieving ethnic diversity within the UCSF community" for the development of these programs. In 1999, the American College of Psychiatrists awarded UCSF the Creativity in Psychiatric Education Award "given in official recognition of creativity in addressing significant educational issues and sustained commitment to excellence in psychiatric education that can serve as a model for other programs."

As a senior faculty member of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, I provide leadership in diversity for the UCSF and UC system-wide. From 2002 to 2006, I was a member of the Equal Opportunity Committee of the UCSF Academic Senate and chaired it from 2004 to 2006. Also from 2004 to 2006, I was the UCSF representative to the system-wide Academic Senate University Committee on Affirmative Action and Diversity (UCAAD); in the 2007-2008 academic year, I am the Vice-chairperson. I also served four years on the UCSF Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Diversity and chaired the Faculty Subcommittee for two years.

As a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), I have contributed to the areas of cultural psychiatry, psychiatric education, media and psychiatry, and the interface of psychiatry and religion/spirituality through numerous presentations and more than 70 publications. I have presented at every APA annual meeting since 1984, and began my 20-year work with the APA on the APA Committee of Asian-American Psychiatrists (1987-1993), which I chaired for 3 years. As a member of the Scientific Program Committee (1992 to 2000), I chaired the Media Subcommittee for 6 years. I was awarded the 2001 APA Kun-Po Soo Award for significant contributions toward understanding the impact of Asian cultural heritage in areas relevant to psychiatry, and in 2002 I received an APA Special Presidential Commendation from President Richard Harding for work in cross-cultural psychiatry.

Under five APA Presidents from 2002 to 2007, I chaired the APA Council on Minority Mental Health and Health Disparities, which participated in developing several APA initiatives: 1) hiring a full-time director of the Department of Minority and National Affairs, 2) APA Action Plan for Reducing Mental Health Disparities, 3) APA's support of affirmative action in the Supreme Court case Grutter v. University of Michigan, 4) APA Resource document on Religious/Spiritual Commitments and Psychiatric Practice, 5) Updating the Membership Profile form to include languages spoken, greater specificity of race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation, 6) APA Position statement against racism and racial discrimination and their adverse impacts on mental health, 7) APA Position statement in support of legal recognition of same-sex civil marriage, 8) APA's support of the Language Access in Health Care Statement of Principles, authored by the National Health Law Program, 9) incorporating cultural and gender issues into the DSM-V development process.

I am a member of the Association for Academic Psychiatry (AAP), the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training (AADPRT), and the Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry (ADMSEP). Since 2005, I have served on the Editorial Board of the APPI journal Academic Psychiatry. From 2006 to 2009, I am serving as the Senior Consultant for the AAP, and in 2006 was selected to be part of the inaugural group of AAP Distinguished Life Fellows.

In 2002, I was awarded the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill Exemplary Psychiatrist Award for exceptional cultural awareness and sensitivity. In 2003, I was awarded the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists Distinguished Service Award. I am a Distinguished Fellow of the Pacific Rim College of Psychiatrists as well as a member of the American College of Psychiatrists, the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture since 1987, and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Cultural Psychiatry Committee, since 1994.

Since the publication of DSM-IV in 1994, I have disseminated the DSM-IV Outline for Cultural Formulation (Outline) through numerous lectures, publications, and a 58-minute training videotape/DVD "The Culture of Emotions" (2002) for which I served as the Executive Scientific Advisor. Since the Outline was placed in Appendix I of DSM-IV in 1996, many clinicians and trainees were not aware of this concise clinical tool that could help bring cultural issues in the clinical encounter to bear on differential diagnosis and treatment planning.

I was the lead author of one of the first articles on the Outline (1995), referenced as part of an updated literature review (2006). I contributed to a GAP monograph entitled Cultural Assessment in Clinical Practice (2002) about the Outline. I also served on the Workgroup on the Practice Guidelines for the Psychiatric Evaluation of Adults, 1st and 2nd editions; for the 2nd edition, I worked on having the Outline included in the text (2006). I have also participated in a CME course on the Outline at the APA Annual Meeting since 1995, chaired by one of my former UCSF residents, Russell Lim MD. I also contributed to the Forward and an annotated bibliography on cultural psychiatry for The Clinical Manual of Cultural Psychiatry edited by Russell Lim, MD, (2006), which is about the Outline.

Since 2000, I have served on the Board of Directors for the National Asian American and Pacific Islander Mental Health Association (NAAPIMHA) and as President of the Board since 2007. NAAPIMHA's mission is to advocate on behalf of Asian and Pacific Islander mental health issues, to serve as a forum for effective collaboration and to network among stakeholders of community based organizations, consumers, family members, service providers, program developers, researchers, evaluators and policy makers, and nonprofit community-based organizations to develop comprehensive, culturally competent services to meet the needs of Asian and Pacific Islander communities. NAAPIMHA was awarded one of four SAMHSA Workforce Training Grants to Reduce Mental Health Disparities (2003-2006); I served on the Executive Committee to implement the curriculum at four national sites.

Since 1987, I have co-led 20 film seminars at Esalen Institute; 16 have been co-led with the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, who is originally from Austria. These seminars are described at www.gratefulness.org/readings/healing_films.htm Of note, we share the same favorite film, "Ikiru" directed by Akira Kurosawa. An article about it, one of the most important articles I have written, can be found at www.francislumd.com

December 5, 2007