Gary Jacobson

Gary Jacobson is a graduate of the Yale University School of Medicine and has been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital since 1969 where he is a Supervising Psychiatrist. He was also a member of the faculty of Boston University School of Medicine and on the faculty of Tufts Medical School from 2003 to 2018. He is a Diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and has served as an Examiner for that Board.

Dr. Jacobson founded the Westwood Pembroke Health System in 1973, a three-hospital private psychiatric care system in Massachusetts and served as its Chief Medical Officer until 2018. He retired in 2021 from the private practice of psychiatry which focused on the problems confronting high achieving individuals. His professional interests and writings include the integration of contemporary psychotherapies with pharmacotherapy, medico-legal consultation, risk management, couple and family therapy, and conflict resolution. He has lectured widely on suicide prevention including at the Harvard Post-Graduate Course on Risk Management and is the author of “The Inpatient Management of Suicidality” in The Harvard Medical School Guide to Suicide Assessment and Intervention (1999). He has also lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and at Brandeis University on changes in identity as a result of long-lasting interpersonal and intergroup conflict.

Dr. Jacobson has been a Research Associate in child and family development at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland and a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Public Health Service. He served on a Blue-Ribbon Committee for the National Brain Injury Foundation and was the Founder and President of The Fund for Psychiatry, a not-for-profit organization supporting research and patient care. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and has served as a President of its District Branch, the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society. Together with his patients, he has endowed an annual Grand Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital on Promising Innovations in Psychiatry.

Dr. Jacobson is currently a University Fellow at Brandeis University and serves as an Overseer and the immediate Past President of the Middle East Forum of Falmouth, a not-for-profit lecture and discussion series. He has been a member of the Board of Overseers of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Massachusetts beginning in 2002 and since 2013 is a Member of the MBL’s Council under the University of Chicago.

He served as a Member of the Board of ADL New England primarily under Leonard Zakim where he developed an interest in the study of Islam after 9/11 and has spoken at the Quincy Islamic Center at the invitation of Imam Tal Eid. He served as a Board Member of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) New England and under AJC’s auspices was the Co-Chair of the Muslim-Jewish Dialogue Group for four years with Co-Chair Mahmud Jafri.

He was a Member of the Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where he chaired the Fellowship Committee consisting of early career professionals in the social services from throughout the Middle East.

He lives in Waban and Falmouth Massachusetts with his wife who is an oboist and retired attorney and has three children and nine grandchildren, the youngest of whom is 12 years old, lives in New Jersey and is a Patriots fan who corresponds with Robert Kraft.

His interests include painting of seascapes, sailing, and hiking with Leki trekking poles in the US, Europe, and Canada.