Public Biography
Dr. Reginald Fortenberry is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, where he holds the Klein-Avery Chair in Clinical Diagnostics. His work concerns the historical sociology of psychiatric classification, the politics of inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and what he has called, in three of his four books, “the standing tendency of American medicine to mistake a national symptom for a private disease.”
Dr. Fortenberry received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and a Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science from the same institution in 1994. He completed his psychiatric residency at the Yale-New Haven Hospital and held faculty appointments at Penn and at Cornell before moving to Chicago in 2009. He has served on the DSM Task Force in three successive revision cycles, and has, in his own count, “filed more dissents than the typical Supreme Court justice.”
He is the author of The Diagnostic Reflex: How American Psychiatry Pathologizes Public Life (Oxford University Press, 2017), A History of Names: The DSM and Its Borrowed Vocabulary (Norton, 2020), and the forthcoming Against Inclusion: Notes from the Dissenting Side of the Working Group (Norton, 2026), the manuscript of which contains a chapter, leaked to Slate in early 2026, on his objections to the inclusion of Patriotic Derealization Syndrome.
Dr. Fortenberry lives in Hyde Park with his wife, a labor historian, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, where his pieces are filed in a register colleagues have described as “elegantly unyielding.”