Pittsburgh: Then and Now

Flashback, June 2001: After putting out an email Newsletter for two years, I finally summon up the nerve to attend my first psychiatric conference. The occasion is the Fourth International Conference on Bipolar Disorder, held every two years, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh and the Western Psychiatric Institute.

The gathering is at a hotel on a trendy strip along one of the riverfronts. I have a Priceline deal at a hotel a good long walk away.

A short while earlier, I had made the major marketing error of charging for my Newsletter to a readership who can't afford to pay. My subscription base plummeted to a few hundred. My little enterprise would probably not last the year. Nevertheless, it is my ticket to a media credential for the Conference.

I register and help myself to coffee and Danish, plus a yogurt and a juice, while trying to juggle my conference materials as I seat myself in a cramped space and attempt to make small talk with a very attractive European pharmacy expert. The Joe Cool act doesn't fly. My coffee is slopping over the rim of my saucer, and the only way I would be able to negotiate my Danish was if my elbow were to suddenly sprout fingers.

The opening session starts and I'm in a new world. These are the top international experts. They mention drugs by their generic names. They keep referring to Emil Kraepelin, whoever he is. They throw around words like glia and etiology without explaining what they mean. Somehow, I manage to get through the day without totally embarrassing myself.

On the evening of Day Two of the conference I make my first minor faux pas (that is to say, the first one that I notice). I hadn't bothered to take my sport jacket to the second day of the meeting. But now we're being shuttled off to a more formal setting at the Carnegie Museum, and I can't exactly go up the elevator to retrieve my jacket.

I am definitely out of place as I gamefully introduce myself to Michael Thase MD, one of the Conference organizers. A roving photographer asks a group of us to pose. Me, Dr Thase, and a darkly-tanned blond Dutch pediatric psychiatrist in open-toed stilettos. I so totally do not belong in this picture.

The occasion is the first-ever presentation of the Mogens Schou Awards and dinner. The Danish lithium pioneer Mogens Schou receives the Founders Award in absentia. Other honorees are the legendary Swiss diagnostician Jules Angst, and philanthropists Vada and Ted Stanley.

Later, the shuttle drops us off at the conference venue, and I set off on my own into the night, back to my hotel.

Fast Forward, June 2007, the Seventh International Bipolar Conference. My luxury hotel suite has been comped. The hotel adjoins the David Lawrence Convention Center, where the conference now takes place to a much larger gathering. I meet a good friend who has kindly agreed to be my platonic conference date in the lobby, where a shuttle takes us to a pre-conference function at the home of Conference organizers David Kupfer MD and Ellen Frank PhD. I make casual small talk with people who got much better grades than me in high school.