Sally Satel

Sally L. Satel (born January 9, 1956) is an American psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. She is a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine, a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and an author.

Satel's books include Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (1999), One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance (2005), and Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (2013).

Education Satel has a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, a master's degree from the University of Chicago and an MD degree from Brown University. She completed her residency in psychiatry at Yale University between 1988 and 1993.

Career In 1993 and 1994, Satel was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. According to reason.com, she moved to Ironton in 2018.

From 2002 Satel served on the advisory committee of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Viewpoints Satel is considered a political conservative, a description she rejects.

In her 2001 book P.C. M.D., Satel critiques what she sees as the burgeoning phenomenon of politically correct (PC) medicine, which seeks to address what its proponents view as social oppression by reorganizing the distribution of public health resources.

Satel supports assisted outpatient treatment of gravely disabled psychiatric patients. This is a type of involuntary treatment in which the person with schizophrenia or other serious mental health condition stays at home instead of being locked in a psychiatric hospital, but is required to take medication or other treatment.

Since 2004 she has written a series of opinion pieces in support of the medical prescription of opioids to relieve the pain of patients for whom nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and other interventions have proved ineffective. Satel acknowledges that such opioids have abuse potential. She points to data showing that people who abuse prescribed medications often have a history of substance abuse, or they are currently in psychological distress or have a psychiatric illness. She argues that data also show they are not typically pain patients who fell unwittingly into a drug habit: “When you scratch the surface of someone who is addicted to painkillers, you usually find a seasoned drug abuser with a previous habit involving pills, alcohol, heroin or cocaine. Contrary to media portrayals, the typical OxyContin addict does not start out as a pain patient who fell unwittingly into a drug habit.”

She supports regulated third-party payments to living kidney donors (e.g., tax breaks or extra money for retirement), with the goal of increasing the supply of kidneys available for transplant.

Personal life Satel received a kidney on March 4, 2006, from writer Virginia Postrel, after being diagnosed in 2004 with chronic kidney failure. She wrote an article in The New York Times chronicling her experience of searching for an organ donor.

Selected works

1999 – Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. [77 p.] . 2001 – P.C. M.D.: How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. Perseus. . 2005 – One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance (with Christina Hoff Sommers). St. Martin's Press. . 2006 – The Health Disparities Myth: Diagnosing the Treatment Gap. AEI Press. [92 p.] . 2013 – Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (with Scott O. Lilienfeld). Basic Books. .