James Gilligan

Dr. James Gilligan is on the faculty of New York University where he is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, Adjunct Professor in the School of Law Professor, and Collegiate Professor in the School of Arts and Science. For the Department of Psychiatry he serves as a consultant and supervisor on the evaluation and treatment of the violent mentally ill.

For more than 30 years Dr. Gilligan served on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, where he directed the Institute of Law and Psychiatry and led a team of colleagues from Harvard teaching hospitals in providing mental health and violence prevention services to the Massachusetts prisons and prison mental hospital.

Dr. Gilligan is best known for developing a general theory of the causes and prevention of violence. His theory posits the universal cause of violent behavior stems from being overwhelmed by feelings of shame and humiliation, as well as being insulted, disrespected, ridiculed or rejected by others, or treated as inferior or unimportant. That is, violence is always a desperate and risky attempt to gain respect, attention and recognition for oneself or the group with which one identifies. This theory is able to explain the whole range of violent behaviors, from individual (homicide and suicide) to collective (war, terrorism and genocide), and enables doctors to devise and test practical methods for the prevention of violence. Through his work preventing violence among the most violent people our society produces, in prisons and prison mental hospitals, he has become one of the leading exponents of shifting our emphasis from punishing violence after it occurs to preventing it before it happens.

He is the author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic and Preventing Violence: Prospects for Tomorrow. He is a co-author and co-editor of Youth Violence: Scientific Approaches to Prevention, the proceedings of a three-day symposium of the New York Academy of Sciences organized around his model of the primary, secondary and tertiary prevention of violence. A contributing author of Forensic Psychotherapy: Crime, Psychodynamics and the Offender Patient, he also contributes to the Editorial Board of other journals and books, including the Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, and Violence in America: An Encyclopedia.

In 2000, President Clinton appointed Dr. Gilligan to the Academic Advisory Council of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence, where he chaired the Committee on Violence Prevention. He has also served as a consultant on violent crime and punishment, including war crimes, throughout the United States and around the world to many other world leaders and institutions. In 2005, Dr. Gilligan was asked by the office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, to collaborate in writing a report on the global problem of "Violence Against Children," which was presented to the General Assembly.

In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal and other atrocities committed in American military prisons, often by individuals who had already been disciplined or fired for similar behavior in our civilian prisons, Dr. Gillian served on the National Commission on Safety and Abuse in American Prisons to assess the nature and extent of prison violence in this country and publishing a report on the causes, consequences and prevention of this problem, and presenting to the US Senate Judiciary Committee.

Dr. Gilligan has appeared in several Emmy-nominated documentary films for television, and has appeared on ABC television on Peter Jennings’ newscast and Ted Koppel’s Nightline as well as a CBS Town Meeting on the juvenile justice system hosted by Dan Rather. He has participated in discussions of his books on NPR’s "Fresh Air," with Terry Gross, and "The Connection" and on numerous other radio and television programs throughout the US, Canada, England and other countries.

Most recently, Dr. Gilligan served as the psychiatric consultant and advisor for director Martin Scorsese on his newest film, Shutter Island, based on the novel of same name by best-selling author Dennis Lehane. The film is a fictionalized account of the history of the Massachusetts prison mental hospital for the "criminally insane" during the time Dr. Gilligan was its Medical Director. Ben Kingsley is playing the role of Dr. John Cawley that is based on Dr. Gilligan.

His current research and writing is on the politics and economics of violence, and is devoted to his recent discovery that rates of both suicide and homicide in the US since 1900 have increased dramatically when Republicans are in the White House, and decrease dramatically when Democrats reside there.