Public Biography
Dr. Constance Halbritter is a clinical psychiatrist and the founding director of the Bethesda Center for Civic Affective Disorders, a federally funded research and treatment facility in Bethesda, Md., where she has led the country’s first dedicated clinical program for what she and her colleagues have termed “civic affective conditions” since 2023.
Dr. Halbritter received her M.D. from the Yale School of Medicine in 1996 and completed her residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by a fellowship in clinical research at the National Institute of Mental Health. She held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Pennsylvania before founding the Bethesda Center, an arrangement she has described as “the obvious next step for a clinician who has spent two decades referring patients to a specialty that did not exist.”
She is the lead author of the working group paper that introduced Patriotic Derealization Syndrome to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2026, a designation she has described in public remarks as “long overdue, even if the precipitating stimulus had been hoped, in the early drafts, to be a class of stimuli rather than a single individual.” She is the author of The Civic Patient: Toward a Clinical Framework for Political Affect (Columbia University Press, 2024) and the author or coauthor of more than seventy peer-reviewed articles, including the widely cited “Architectural Absence: Toward a Vocabulary for Patients Who Report a Country They Cannot Find” (American Journal of Psychiatry, 2025).
Dr. Halbritter lives in Bethesda with her husband, a retired epidemiologist, and serves on the editorial boards of JAMA Psychiatry and the Journal of Affective Disorders.