Fernando Espi Forcen, MD, PhD

Fernando Espi Forcen, MD, PhD, has worked at Rush since September 2015 as a consult liaison psychiatrist with a particular focus on patients in need of liver and kidney transplants. He was born and raised in Spain and graduated from Medical School at the University of Murcia. In the same university he read a PhD on the History of Psychiatry titled “Demons, Fast and Death:  Mental Health in the Late Middle Ages,” in which he studied the approach to mental illness in Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries. As a result of the publications from this work, he was awarded best PhD by the health science program for the 2015-16 academic years. Forcen did psychiatry residency at Metrohealth Medical Center in Cleveland. Following that he did a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Chicago and another fellowship in psycho-oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has more than 20 peer reviewed publications in a variety aspects of psychiatry, such as akathisia due to drugs, metabolic syndrome, inflammation, dissociative symptoms, history of psychiatry and cinema. He has presented this work at most of the major academic meetings, including the APA, WPA, APM, AACAP and AAAP. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychiatry and the author of the book Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths:  Psychiatry and Horror Film. In this book he studies society’s perception of mental illness throughout horror film according to its historical context. His major interests are philosophy, art history, rock music, gastronomy and cinema and has found in Chicago a good niche to combine all these interests.