Susan Parke, MD, is a psychiatrist and medical director of Community Forensics Services at the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) in New Haven. CMHC is a collaboration between Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and the Connecticut Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services.
Dr. Parke, a child, adult and forensic psychiatrist, says she decided to pursue a career in psychiatry after working as a high school counselor. “I thought that the students I was meeting with were struggling emotionally with issues that were being impacted by physiological processes,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t know enough about the body and wanted to learn more.”
Dr. Parke says she was particularly drawn to helping people who have experienced trauma. “I’m interested in how environment might affect people, which got me interested in children and adolescents. And then I started to be interested in forensics and people’s rights, including their right to treatment and to refuse it,” she says.
The CMHC Community Forensic Services team works with legally involved clients, including those who have been incarcerated and are returning to the community and those who have been found guilty of a crime due to insanity, as well as clients are in a residential jail diversion program and those who may need more intensive and comprehensive wrap-around services and reside at a forensic residential program.
Dr. Parke says her favorite part of her job is building relationships with patients and learning their history. “I enjoy learning how they became who they are, who they would like to be, and figuring out how to assist them in doing that,” she says. “We don’t always have the solution for patients struggles but, in some small measure, can be on the journey with them.”
