Robert C. Smith

Robert C. Smith, MD, MACP is a University Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry Emeritus from Michigan State University. With many publications, awards, and strong grant support, he has been involved in teaching and research in patient-centered communication and in primary care mental health since 1985.

He and his colleagues behaviorally defined the patient-centered interview as a replicable model that can be systematically taught and studied. Later, they showed it was evidence-based in two controlled trials. Dr. Smith and his colleagues have written a popular interviewing textbook, Smith’s Patient-Centered Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Method (4th edition, McGraw Hill, 2018). Endorsed by the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare, the text is widely used in medical and nursing schools in the USA and abroad for teaching interviewing and the doctor-patient relationship.

Dr. Smith’s group also formulated a behaviorally defined method, the Mental Health Care Model, to guide medical clinicians in managing mental health and substance misuse problems. They subsequently demonstrated that the model was effective in two clinical trials and have recently demonstrated in a controlled trial that teachers trained in the method effectively taught it to residents, paving the way for dissemination of the teaching via an outreach program. Based on the model, a second textbook from McGraw-Hill, Essentials of Psychiatry in Primary Care: Behavioral Health in the Medical Setting was published in 2019. It is endorsed by the American College of Physicians and used in training students and clinicians how to conduct primary care mental health.

Dr. Smith and his group have been featured on The Today Show as well as featured and quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, the Ladies Home Journal, Time, and Newsweek.

Dr. Smith's new book -- HAS MEDICINE LOST ITS MIND? -- will be published by Prometheus Books on March 4, 2025. It portrays the poor state of mental health care in America as due to untrained clinicians conducting 75% or more of all this care. Because medical education resists changing its educational practices, HAS MEDICINE LOST ITS MIND? advises that an enraged public and its politicians must require medicine to change to better meet the needs of the public it serves.