James Charney

I was an English major at Columbia College when you could do that as a pre-med student. I received my MD from Duke University School of Medicine. My training in Psychiatry and Child Psychiatry was at the University of Washington in Seattle. I am a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Child Study at the Yale School of Medicine, where I teach psychiatric interviewing and diagnosis to medical students and residents, whenever I am in New Haven. I recently retired from a 35 year private practice of child and family psychiatry in New Haven, Connecticut. For 25 years I was the psychiatric consultant to the Choate-Rosemary Hall school in Wallingford, Connecticut, a private boarding high school whose alumni range from John F. Kennedy to Jamie Leigh Curtis. For 13 years I taught “Madness at the Movies,” a popular Seminar at Yale College. Since retiring, I continue to teach at the School of Medicine and consult at a private high school in Rome. I have taught a version of “Madness at the Movies” at Arcadia University in Rome, at The American University in Rome, and at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

“Madness at the Movies” is my first book and is based on the Yale course. It is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

I have been married to Diane for 50 years. She is retired, after teaching French Literature and Writing at Yale for 35 years. Our son, Noah Charney, is a widely published author on the subject of art crime and art history. My wife and I live part of each year near Orvieto, in Italy, to be close to our son and his family.