Emily Simerly, Ph.D.

Born and raised in Albany, Georgia, ethnic Albanian.  Fifty-two years in Georgia:  twenty years in Albany, thirty-two years in Atlanta.  Three years in sunny southern California as a psychology intern at a hospital for the criminally insane.  Eight years as a licensed clinical psychologist in Georgia.  Author of articles on a rape crisis center, how and why I became a psychotherapist, how borderline personality disorders are like desert flora, why it is a privilege to work in a prison.  Nine years as a hired editor for medical and psychological journals.  Five years as clinical director of the mental health/mental retardation unit in a maximum-security prison.  Therapist to Death Row inmates.  Clinical supervisor to counselors.  Overseer of psychiatric and psychological care.  Regional Clinical Director providing oversight of prisons in the northern region of Georgia.  Accused of being cat staff.  Pled guilty.


Current projects:

Mental health medications for children: A primer for school professionals.
Authors:  Ronald T. Brown, Ph.D., Laura Arnstein Carpenter, Ph.D., and Emily Simerly, Ph.D.  Publisher: Guilford Publications. To be published August 2005.
Screenplay on a year as a clinical psychology intern at a hospital for patients not guilty by reason of insanity.
Working title:  Highway 61. Companion book (with  less fiction).

Author of essays about life and psychology.
Mentor and coach to writers and graduate students.
Psychotherapist to shoplifters, murderers, and in-betweens.

Here are two excerpts from my article on why I love my day job:

I Come from Privilege
  by Emily Simerly, Ph.D.
  published in Voices, Fall 2001.

        I come from privilege.  I left there about an hour ago.  While I’m there, I’m reminded that I’m privileged because I see miracles happen daily. The privilege I speak of is a men’s prison. Most people I know, therapists and otherwise, have no sympathy for criminals. With prisoners, it’s not an I and Thou, it’s an Us and Them. The incarcerated folk are a good repository for our revenge needs, our sense of righteous anger, our moral superiority. It’s easy to look down on a group who seem so justly to deserve their current fate. We can curl our lips at inmates: we are afraid of them, they deserve it, they bring it on themselves (which you may recall was and sometimes is said about rape victims and others who have been harmed), just pick a reason. They are the lowest caste in our country. They are our untouchables.
_________________

        Another inmate I work with is ill with AIDS. He is “poor white trash,” as we used to designate them, with a speech impediment and a quite low IQ, culture-fair or otherwise. But I sit mesmerized by him in therapy group as he confronts others much better off than he is about their own self-destructive behavior, as he talks about his constant suicidal thoughts, as he thanks the group for letting him talk about his shame. Retarded, you say? According to whom? This same inmate, who cannot take the cocktail medicines that are so helpful against HIV, occasionally comes for an individual session. At the last one, we talked about telling his family and how hard that will be and about his hopes for the future. He got up to go but when he got to my door, he turned to me and said, “Thank you for helping me be human again. It makes dying easier.”
 

And here are some excerpts from other articles and my book that I find especially pleasing:

Medications for Children: A Primer for School Professionals

Chapter 1 excerpt:

        Children, it is said, are our most precious resource. If this is true, then it is incumbent upon us to provide them the very best care possible. Our idea for writing this book stemmed from our belief that the knowledge and experience we can provide practitioners can help children receive the care that will create a better next generation. We wanted to help those who are on the frontlines every day – teachers, school administrators, school psychologists, nurses, parents, and grandparents – make the myriad daily decisions that go into forming a healthy child.

        Raising children in the world today is a very complex task that gets only more complex with each passing year. We created this book to serve as a reference guide for understanding and working with school-aged children and adolescents. We are also aware that the book could be useful and of benefit to a larger circle of others who have crucial input into the welfare of children. Thus, we designed the book primarily for school personnel but invite others to use it as it is helpful.

From Desert Borders, published in Voices, Summer 1990:

        The dry, hostile, prickly vista of the desert is as far from the warm, soft, wet furrow of the South Georgia I grew up in as a borderline is from an earth mother. I spent 20 years in the dampness that defines South Georgia. My early dreams and nightmares had to do with water and responsibility. The atmosphere begged for green growth – mildew and moss, lush grass and thick overhang were all a part of the verdant home I knew.

        Many unknowing souls refer to the South as “backward” and “ignorant.” I believe that the real truth about us is not that we are backward, but that we are primitive. We have not evolved in the way the rest of the country has – we are still in a transitional stage of evolution, where ontogeny has a shorter phylogeny to recapitulate. We still have the vestiges of gills in our jaws, so that when we are out running in the heavy aquarium of morning dew, we can filter oxygen out of the water that is supposed to be air. Our world has not forced as much adaptation.

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