Alum`s distinct passions merge

The age in which David Hellerstein +óGé¼-£71 attended Hawken was marred by unrest. The United States was embroiled in an unpopular Vietnam War, the threat of the draft looming over the heads of young men everywhere, and social upheaval was at an all-time high. Hellerstein needed clarity. Now a noted psychiatrist and writer, Dr. David Hellerstein recently spoke to Hawken students recounting the journey he took in getting to become a widely published author and doctor. His visit was a part of the Pathways Program, which connects students with professionals, while serving as a guide in helping students to navigate their own future career paths. Hellerstein was born into a family with a firmly rooted legacy of people becoming doctors. "From the moment I could say the word +óGé¼-£stethoscope,` I knew I was going to become a doctor," he said. "...But I wasn`t sure if I wanted to be." During his time at Hawken, while he and his friends attempted to make sense of a world that had peers overdosing on drugs, suffering from mental breakdowns and dying in car accidents, he said he had an awakening to the idea of becoming a writer. "If the world was so crazy, which it seemed to be at that time, at least words might be able to document this craziness or maybe even to explain it," he said. That left him at odds. On the one hand there was a knowing that becoming a doctor was his destiny, on the other was his burgeoning passion for literature and writing. After graduating from Hawken, the conflict eventually led to his dropping out of Harvard during his junior year to pursue the latter. During the hiatus, Hellerstein participated in a series of writing workshops that helped him develop the writer`s essence: keen observational skills, the art of revision, and deep, analytical reading skills. He emerged a changed man and decided to return to school for his senior year. Destiny, however, called prompting him to enter Stanford University`s School of Medicine after graduation. There he began toying with the idea that maybe he didn`t have to choose between his two interests. "I found that there were many doctors who had been writers and writers who`d also been doctors," he said. Hellerstein dually enrolled in a graduate fiction-writing workshop at Stanford, working concurrently on novels and short stories and in anatomy labs and other medical school courses. Two career paths that he had straddled for years had finally merged. "I had double vision," he said. "I lived in two different worlds." He`s taken that "double vision" and parlayed it into extremely successful writing and medical careers. Hellerstein is currently the medical director of the Columbia Psychiatry Clinical Trials Program, a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, associate professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, the director of the Mood Disorders Research Unit at St. Luke`s Roosevelt Hospital in New York and a private practitioner. His literary work has been published in Harper`s, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. In addition, he`s written a handful of novels and numerous essays, short stories and articles. Hellerstein said Hawken gave him the essential tools for his two careers, also giving him a means to express himself. "Being a really attentive reader, being a critical thinker, learning to read books, but also learning to read the world-that, to me, is what a school like Hawken can teach you.\" Read more about the Pathways Program here.