Addressing Mental Health Needs

Dr. Jerry Carter, St. John’s psychiatrist

Dr. Jerry Carter, psychiatrist, has started Psychiatry Consultation Liaison Service at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield to assist with mental health needs of hospitalized patients.

Mental health issues have an impact on a patient’s ability to recover from a physical illness. Dr. Carter and the psychiatry services team both evaluate and diagnose patients and educate family members.

Dr. Carter provides assistance to patients who have:

• Emotional, behavioral, and/or cognitive changes of unclear origin or significance including delirium, for assistance with diagnosis and/or management;
• Substance withdrawal syndromes;
• Physical symptoms of unclear origin.

He completed residencies in internal medicine and psychiatry and is board certified in both areas. He completed a medical psychiatry fellowship, which included clinical research in the study of delirium. He worked at the Allegheny Neuropsychiatric Institute and has experience working with patients with various neurologic, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders and traumatic brain injuries and is a member of the American Neuropsychiatric Association. He’s served as a psychiatric consultant at hospitals in Pittsburgh, Pa. and Western Massachusetts for 19 years and was the medical director of Berkshire County’s chemical dependency unit.

In addition, Dr. Carter is the supervising physician for St. Johns’ Psychiatric Evaluation Nurse Service, (PENS), and also offers assistance to St. John’s Chemical Dependency program in complicated situations in which there are questions of coexisting substance abuse and psychiatric or cognitive disorders, including delirium.