Articles by Fernando Espi Forcen, MD, PhD, Steven Schlozman, MD and Gene Beresin

Dr. Fernando Espi Forcen was born and raised in Spain and graduated from Medical School at the University of Murcia. At the University of Murcia, he also earned and was awarded best PhD by the health science program for the 2015-16 academic years for his dissertation on the History of Psychiatry titled “Demons, Fast and Death: Mental Health in the Late Middle Ages,” which studied the approach to mental illness in Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries. He completed his psychiatry residency at Metrohealth Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and followed that with a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Chicago, and another fellowship in psycho-oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

As an attending, Dr. Espi Forcen worked at Rush from 2015 to 2020 to as a consult liaison psychiatrist with a particular focus on patients in need of liver and kidney transplants. He worked with the underserved community of West Chicago, and was granted a National Interest Green Card. In the scientific field, Dr. Espi Forcen’s publications have contributed to a variety of aspects in the field of neuropsychiatry. He studied akathisia in children and adolescents and patients with cancer, and did a study in patients with catatonia comparing the phenomenology in patients who had catatonia associated with another mental disorder as compared to those who had catatonic disorder due to a medical condition. In addition, he has published extensively in the field of history of psychiatry. Another area of interest and research has been cultural psychiatry, particularly studies in cultural aspects in International Medical Graduates and historical aspects of Hispanic and Latinx Psychiatry.

One of Dr. Espi Forcen’s main interests is the depiction of psychiatry in the media. He has published articles on horror films and TV shows, and has presented this work at most of the major academic meetings, including the APA, WPA, APM, AACAP and AAAP. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychiatry and the author of the book Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths: Psychiatry and Horror Film. In this book, he examines society’s perception of mental illness throughout horror film according to its historical context. He also started a psychiatry podcast titled El Ultimo Humanists with more than 10,000 subscribers.