The following is what Bill wrote about himself, which he titled his "Relevant Autobiography."
I am a retired psychiatrist, who for about fifty years
treated children, adolescents, adults, and the aged, utilizing both
psychotherapeutic and pharmacological modalities. I have since my teens
been essentially atheistic, but have always been interested in
philosophy and religion, as ways to understand my existence, and
existence in general, in as basic a way as possible. For many years I
attended the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte, and I attended
the weekly Philosophy Discussion Group there for over ten years.
Subsequently I have attended various Christian churches or church
activities, but have not identified with or joined any religious
organization. For a number of years I have been the organizer of the
Charlotte Philosophy Discussion Group. And over recent years I have
spent several thousand hours pursuing the gradually emerging
understanding of the phenomena that I have labeled “Humanianity,” and
that I am now trying to share.
My undergraduate education was undertaken at George Washington
University in Washington, DC, where I obtained a Bachelor of Science
degree with a major in Psychology, and a Master of Science degree in
Psychology (Personality Theory). This education was simultaneous with my
pre-medical curriculum. I then entered the George Washington University
School of Medicine and obtained my Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) in 1961.
After a year of mixed medicine internship at the District of Columbia
General Hospital, I undertook my psychiatric residency for three years
at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. My areas of special
interest at that time were psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy,
family psychotherapy, and milieu therapy. During my residency, I
developed two therapeutic communities (in which the social structure of
the ward is used as a tool in healing and promotion of personal growth).
During my training (and subsequently), I undertook several years of
personal psychoanalysis.
Following my training in psychiatry, I served as a psychiatrist at the
Philadelphia Naval Hospital for two years. I then came to practice at
John Umstead Hospital, the state psychiatric hospital in Butner, NC, for
two and a half years, during which time I developed another therapeutic
community.
I then entered a two-year child psychiatry and community psychiatry
fellowship at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, where I
further studied family psychotherapy and was trained in child
psychotherapy. I also became a consultant at the C. A. Dillon School in
Butner, the maximum security correctional school for the juvenile
justice system, continuing in that role for about five years, treating
severely dysfunctional adolescents at the school.
For a half year after the two years of child and community psychiatry
training, I returned to work at John Umstead Hospital on an adult unit,
and then became the director of the Children and Youth Unit at Cherry
Hospital in Goldsboro, NC, another state psychiatric hospital. There I
again developed an intensive milieu therapy program (therapeutic
community), as well as providing family psychotherapy for many of the
children and youth there. After four and a half years, I relocated to
Shelby, NC to become the Director of Clinical Services at the Community
Mental Health Center. After two and a quarter years, I began my private
practice of psychiatry, as described above, beginning in 1979 and ending
with final retirement at the end of 2014.
During my private practice, I began to utilize my own "anger management
paradigm" (later changed to "anger prevention paradigm," to distinguish
it from other efforts that became popular) in my work with couples,
primarily, but I began to see the general relevance of the paradigm in
understanding our most basic societal problems, from intrafamilial and
interpersonal relationships to international relationships. Also, I came
to identify what I believe to be an alternative model of child rearing,
alternative to the standard model (with its many variations). The
standard model is my name for that model used unless parenting figures
specifically know how to do otherwise by virtue of a set of consistent
principles, and practices derived from them, acquired through specific
training in child rearing, something that our society currently does not
provide. My clinical experience and the insights obtained from it came
after I experienced the problems within my own life as I attempted to
participate in rearing two children within the standard model.
Throughout my life, I have maintained a love for philosophy, including
epistemology, ontology, and the philosophies of science and ethics.
Through my study of various philosophies, including that done in the
Philosophy Discussion Group, increasing connections began to occur
between philosophical issues and the practical issues mentioned in the
last paragraph. As these connections began to occur, I began leading
groups in "anger management" and "child rearing," and the coalescence of
all of these ideas and activities brought me to the need to write my
first book, in which this coalescence is described. I have used the
ideas in that book every day in personal ways that have helped my life
to have more meaning and effectiveness, as well as in ways that have
helped others. That book is entititled Rational-Ethical Living and the
Emergence of ‘Homo Rationalis’: FOR EVERYONE (The Most Important Book).
It is free for everyone. (None of my efforts regarding Humanianity or
this set of websites has been for, or resulted in, any financial
remuneration, these temporal and financial contributions of mine being
my way of “tithing,” a way of “paying forward.”)
At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte, starting in 2002, I
conducted an Optimal Living Seminar as the companion to the developing
book, and it enriched the book further with the insights and experiences
reported by the group members. Just as the book was written "for
everyone," so was the seminar designed "for everyone." It dealt with our
most basic concerns as a species, in as basic a way possible. The book
and seminar were efforts to make use of what I had learned in order to
do my part to make the world a better place for everyone, insofar as
possible.
In more recent years, I have attempted to formulate more precisely, and
elaborate on more extensively, this basic set of ideas about how our
species can, if we are fortunate and if we can learn to cooperate with
each other to a greater extent, arrive at a far, far better way of life
than we have ever known. This has led to my awareness that our
religions, which are our effort to live our lives in the best possible
way, are crucial to our moving ahead toward this desirable future way of
being. This means that improvement in our religions will be both cause
and effect of our changing ourselves psychosocially.
Seeing all of our religions as moving up their separate paths on the
“mountain” of improvement suggests that the top of the mountain is
something that we can begin to identify in our imagination. That top of
the mountain I have labeled “Humanianity, the Religion for Humanity.”
Until that time arrives, Humanianity is a label for the movement toward
the top of the mountain, occurring to a greater or lesser extent in most
of our religions, and in the ethics of our species in general.
I see all of our religions wrestling with the psychosocial changes that
we have increasingly made as we have moved ahead from the time when we
lived much more like chimpanzees, with almost no ability to communicate
verbally, and as we have become increasingly amazed by and dependent
upon the extremely accurate set of models of reality provided by the
sciences with their adherence to the rules of logic and the rules of
evidence. In this context, our religious writings, once considered
textbooks, now increasingly are coming to be regarded as diaries,
through which we can, through our developing a bird’s eye view of
ourselves over large periods of time, come to understand even more
clearly these important changes we are undergoing.
Because of this evolving set of ideas, and because of my wish to make a
contribution, I have been making efforts to use our modern technology to
provide opportunity for those who are interested in participation in
the discussion of all of these issues. To that end, I have organized in
recent years the Meetup.com group called the Charlotte Philosophy
Discussion Group, in which the understanding is that we are exploring
and debating all of our fundamental ideas, with the idea that depth of
understanding comes about most readily when we explore the basic reasons
for our differences of opinion.
In addition, I have been exploring some approaches possible with our
Internet technology, this set of websites being a part of that effort. I
am grateful for the help that I am receiving from those who are
similarly interested in working for our future generations through the
use of whatever methods we acquire as we move ahead as a species. I also
believe that such work in behalf of future generations can have a very
beneficial effect on the quality of one's life now, and even be of
benefit to others within one's sphere of influence.
