The Pediatrician Who Became a Child Psychiatrist

It started with the kids who couldn’t sleep. During his pediatrics residency, Bruce Leewiwatanakul would sit at the bedside near midnight and let them talk, listening to how a kid ended up in the hospital and what life looked like outside of it. The medicine was familiar to him. The stories were the part he kept coming back to. His mother had told him years earlier to find work he would still feel good about as he grew old, the kind of advice he first answered by teaching math and science near UCLA in college. The listening pointed somewhere else. He Googled whether a pediatrician could move into psychiatry, found the Post-Pediatric Portal Program, and sent in a late application that took him to CHOP for combined adult and child psychiatry training. Now a child psychiatrist at Oregon Health and Science University, he carries both trainings into the same room, where a pediatrician’s instinct for prevention sits alongside a psychiatrist’s understanding of illness. He spends his days in collaborative care, reaching kids with mild to moderate concerns before those concerns harden into something worse, and teaching other pediatric providers to do the same through the TNT Primary Care Fellowships. What keeps him going is the thought of leaving something behind, knowledge that sticks with a patient or a trainee long after they have forgotten where they learned it.