John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Collaborating Network
Affiliations
Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Biography
After receiving his M.D. degree at Columbia and completing a medical internship at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. John Peteet trained in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He is now a staff psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Peteet’s major areas of interest are psychosocial oncology, addiction, and the clinical interface between spirituality/religion and psychiatry. His recent work focuses on the moral dimensions of psychiatric practice, including cultivation of the virtues.
Research Focus
- What is the place of virtues (e.g. gratitude, forgiveness, humility, love) in psychiatry, for both patients and clinicians?
- What mindsets that contribute to mental health stigma do religious leaders and communities sometimes reinforce, and how should these be addressed?
- What is the role of a clinician in addressing moral problems that arise in treatment?
GFI Writings
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Love in Mental Health Treatment
Love is central to human flourishing, and therefore a central concern of psychiatry. Helping patients to love more effectively can become an important focus of treatment when life events challenge a patient, when the patient has lost perspective on love, when a clinician sees a need for love as a he…
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Love and Justice in Psychiatric Practice
I appreciate the chance to read Professor O’Donovan’s Preview. As a psychiatrist who authored a chapter on love in a book on the virtues in psychiatric practice (Peteet 2022), I see loving as central to living well, and helping patients to love more effectively as a potentially important focus of tr…
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
The Virtues in Psychiatric Practice
Dr. Herdt’s beautiful discussion of the virtues clarifies and resonates with my own recent thinking as a Christian academic psychiatrist. Virtues have been historically neglected within psychiatric practice. Reasons include concerns about scientific objectivity, realistic expectations, and therapeut…
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Order, the Moral Life and Mental Health Treatment
This discussion of the moral order is germane to my current work on the psychiatrist’s role in the patient’s moral life. While value neutrality on the part of a therapist is generally recognized to be a myth, explicit discussion of the moral dimension of clinical work is uncommon. This stems in part…
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Virtues for Psychiatrists and Their Patients
As an academic psychiatrist, I am interested in exploring the relevance of the virtues to both the character of the good psychiatrist and to the cultivation of needed virtues in our patients. To this end, I recently edited The Virtues in Psychiatric Practice (Oxford University Press, 2022) , which c…
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
The Good Precedes Moral Rules - That Could Help My Patients
What I find most intriguing in Created Order is the idea that goods (e.g., “friendship with God, personal integrity, just relationships, the experience of beauty, and creativity”) precede moral laws, which serve them. This has at least two liberating implications for me as a psychiatrist. One is tha…
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Where Does a Sense of Identity Fit in Flourishing?
I found the Flourishing preview helpful, and would like to ask, as a psychiatrist interested in the relief of emotional and existential distress, where would the authors locate a sense of meaning and purpose (an element in Tyler VanderWeele’s Flourishing Measure)? While clearly related to emot…
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Is Justice a Treatment Goal for the Good Therapist?
If being just in the first order is a virtue, it would seem relevant in mental health care – as a treatment goal for some individuals, perhaps as an ingredient in the process of therapy, and as a characteristic of a good therapist. Welcoming input from those to whom one is rightly accountable …
John R. Peteet
Harvard Medical School
Justice, Rights and Psychiatry
Justice may at first seem peripheral to the therapeutic enterprise, with its emphases on non-judgmental acceptance and individual growth. But first order justice is often central to the goals of treatment, the clinician’s approach, and the delivery of care. Many patients bring to treatment the impac…