The Penguin Speakers Bureau

After twelve years as the psychiatrist for Smith College, SuEllen Hamkins, MD, now has a private practice in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she specializes in women’s mental health. Raising her two daughters, ages twelve and seventeen, has been the most thrilling and rewarding work of her life.

Aware that the world offers both opportunities and challenges for mothers and girls, SuEllen reached out to other mothers and daughters beginning in her girls’ infancies, and ultimately, along with Renée Schultz, became one of the founding mothers of the The Mother-Daughter Project. Bringing the empowering, nurturing, and joyful message of the Project to other mothers and daughters is SuEllen’s calling.

SuEllen and Renée ecapsulated their observations on mother-daughter relationships in THE MOTHER-DAUGHTER PROJECT, which details the success of the Project’s pioneering model in strengthening bonds between child and mother and strategies for staying close through adolescence and beyond.

SuEllen has given numerous presentations on girls’ and women’s mental health for professional and lay audiences around the world, recently focusing on her ground-breaking discoveries about mothers, daughters, their relationships, and the kinds of communities that nurture them.

As the psychiatrist for the Smith College Counseling Service from 1992-2004, SuEllen offered consultation to over 1,000 women ages sixteen to twenty-three to help them resist and overcome problems such as anorexia, bulimia, depression, anxiety, trauma, assault, and self-injury. Simultaneously, she worked with women and men from all walks of life at the Carson Center, a community mental health clinic where she still performs weekly consultations. She offers psychotherapy and supervision in narrative therapy in her private practice, delighting in helping people cultivate their values and strengths in the face of difficulties through discovering and retelling stories about what gives their lives meaning.

The second-oldest of six children, SuEllen parlayed her experiences as an adolescent into her life’s work of discovering what pulls mothers and daughters apart and finding ways to bring them together. After undergraduate studies at Cornell University, she managed to graduate with honors from the University of Wisconsin Medical School even though she was arrested in her second year for participating in an anti-nuclear war demonstration during halftime at a televised Big Ten football game, an early demonstration of her penchant for bringing progressive ideas to wider audiences. After her psychiatry residency, SuEllen completed a three-year program in family therapy at The Multicultural Family Institute of New Jersey under the supervision of Monica McGoldrick, and was a faculty member from 1990-1992. In 1999, SuEllen participated in advanced training in narrative therapy at the Family Institute of Cambridge, where she is now a guest faculty member.

SuEllen lives with her husband, Jay Indik, and daughters in western Massachusetts, where they love to swim outdoors, cross country ski, shoe snow, dance, cook and lounge around in the living room reading.

Visit Renée Schultz’s web page at www.penguinspeakersbureau.com/speaker/190.