Young patient’s intriguing story drew Memphian to psychiatry
Daniel S. Boyd, MD, knew growing up in Memphis that he could scratch professional basketball from his list of career choices.
At Presbyterian Day School, he said, “I was the only one who distinguished himself with having scored an equal number of baskets for the opponents – two points for them – followed three years later by my redeeming hoop for the right team.”
But medicine was always a strong possibility, he said, “given my father.”
Boyd’s dad was a neurosurgeon. His mother was an English teacher until she stayed home full-time to care for him and his sister, Lundy.
“He introduced me, but did not push me, to medicine,” Boyd said, “reminding me of Tennyson’s Ulysses, who said of his son, ‘He works his work, I mine.’”
Boyd is a psychiatrist and, since 2011, medical director of the Neuroscience Center at Lakeside Behavioral Health System in northeast Shelby County. His primary duties there are supervising the transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) services.
Boyd decided on psychiatry as a specialty during his pediatric internship.
“It crystallized for me when I was taking the history of a 14-year-old who had just overdosed,” he said, “and I found her story much more intriguing than her labs.”
His father had been his role model, “but also his many physician friends whose stories filled our lives,” he said.
Aside from his internship at Baylor in Houston and residency at Vanderbilt, he has been in Memphis nearly his whole life, including medical school. However, his first five years of life included living in Philadelphia while his father was in his internship at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Hospital and in Minnesota while his father was in neurosurgery residency at the Mayo Clinic.
After Vanderbilt, Boyd completed an 18-month contract with Chamberlin Clinic and then worked at Baptist’s and Methodist’s downtown locations.
“I slipped out the back door of downtown Baptist just before it imploded and headed to Lakeside,” he said. With roots sunk deeply in Memphis, he wasn’t going anywhere else. Not long after arriving at Lakeside, he married Teresa, his wife of nearly 16 years.
Lakeside, a 305-bed facility on 37 acres, opened in 1967, and its Neurosciences Center is in its fourth year. Boyd and three other psychiatrists at the center – Carl DaCunha, MD, John Harris, MD, and Christopher White, MD – are all certified by the ISEN (International Society of ECT and Neurostimulation).
ECT has been around for more than a half-century, while TMS was approved only six years ago by the FDA for the treatment of depression. Boyd is enthusiastic about both, in the case of ECT “because of its robust efficacy” and TMS “because of its excellent tolerability.”
Boyd called it a pleasant surprise when former Lakeside CEO Shelley Nowak brought in Charles H. Kellner, MD, for a full day of lectures to the staff on ECT. Kellner is a professor of psychiatry and director of the ECT service at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. According to Mount Sinai, Kellner has dedicated his career to the study of ECT.
“He literally helped write the book on ECT,” Boyd said. “It was a delight to learn from such a great researcher and educator of national renown in the world of ECT.”
Boyd calls ECT the “ace in the hole for treatment of resistant depression, severe suicidal depression, psychotic depression and catatonia from any cause.”
Most commonly, patients at Lakeside are treated for clinical depressions, bipolar disorders, addictions, dementias, PTSD and schizophrenia.
ECT hasn’t always been widely accepted, at least in the public’s view, not to mention the stigma that depression carries. Just 42 years ago, Missouri Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton was dropped as presidential candidate George McGovern’s running mate when it came to light that he had received electroconvulsive treatment for depression.
“There is a lot of misinformation from Hollywood and the Scientologists,” Boyd said. “However, contrasting the vice presidential experience to which you refer is Kitty Dukakis writing a book about her being rescued by ECT.
“Another resource is Carol Kivler's Will I Ever Be the Same Again? Transforming the Face of ECT, which is her personal positive experience with ECT.”
Kivler was diagnosed with mental illness in 1990. She founded Courageous Recovery and, according to its website, now is a professional speaker and author seeking to “raise awareness to remove the stigma of mental illness and instill hope in those who live with it. . . (Kivler) suffers from periodic acute bouts of medication-resistant depression, which in her case is only responsive to ECT.”
In regard to the newer TMS, Boyd said “like the CT machines in the 1970s, TMS machines started where the money was, such as the Northeast and California, and gradually made it to the Mid-South. Our first patient was the first to be treated in Memphis, in 2011.
“TMS offers a different mechanism of action, low side-effect burden and a unique way to augment other treatments of depression, such as exercise, psychotherapy and antidepressants. It requires no anesthesia and has no systemic side effects, such as drowsiness, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, etc., as can be given with medications.”
Still challenging, however, according to Boyd, is “getting insurance companies, other than Medicare, which already pays for TMS under certain conditions, to pay for TMS.”