Academic Career

Who Is Bernard Beitman, MD?

Bernie graduated from Mount Pleasant High School in Wilmington, Delaware in 1960 at #5 Grade Point Average. He majored in Chemistry at Swarthmore College and was one of two outstanding pre-medical students. He attended Yale Medical School graduating in 1964. He did his one-year general medicine internship at Mount Zion Medical Center in San Francisco and then completed the three-year psychiatric residency at Stanford in 1974 after working in the U.S Public Health Service Hospital in San Francisco from 1971-1973 as the hospital’s psychiatrist. He then joined the faculty of the department of psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle. After ten years there he was denied tenure and then joined the faculty at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he became a world leader in the study of chest pain and panic disorder which led to his becoming chair of the psychiatry department. (A door closes, and a big window opens.) Building on his book The Structure of Individual Psychotherapy, he created the book Learning Psychotherapy which was taught to half the psychiatric residency training programs in the United States. In 2006 he started formal research into coincidences and then, in 2009, moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, to join the Division of Perceptual Studies of the University of Virginia, which supported his coincidence work as a non-paid faculty member. As a “recovering academic,” he led the development of The Coincidence Project.