Charles Barber

Charles Barber is a Writer in Residence at Wesleyan and a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale. He is the author of Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, and the forthcoming Citizen Outlaw: A Gangster's Journey, to be published by HarperCollins in 2019. He has written widely on mental health and criminal justice issues, both in popular and scholarly publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, The Nation and Scientific American Mind. Charlie has appeared on the BBC, CNN, CBS News, and NPR’s Fresh Air. Charlie was educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities.

As a criminal justice researcher at The Connection Institute, he co-designed a study funded by the Department of Justice involving the hiring of former prisoners to be counselors in a halfway house. The intervention resulted in dramatically lower criminal recidivism and was named the Outstanding Criminal Justice Program in the Northeast by the National Criminal Justice Association.

He lives in Connecticut with his family, and follows the travails and the successes of the Boston Red Sox with an obsessive particularity. He does his best writing at Blue State Coffee in New Haven.