About

DC Fidler (Author)
Donald Fidler, MD, FRCP-I

Biography

DC Fidler is a native of the North Carolina Appalachian Mountains. He combined a career in academic psychiatry and cultural psychiatry with a lifetime of playwriting, acting, directing, composing music, and teaching creative writing and the dramatic arts.

He studied theatre, writing, medicine, and psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he served on the faculty as a tenured associate professor. He later served on the West Virginia University faculty as the Farnsworth Endowed Chair of Educational Psychiatry and as an adjunct professor in the WVU School of Theatre and Dance.

Dr. Fidler and Dr. Rashida Khakoo created and led the WVU Teaching Scholars Program for faculty members from all branches of the health sciences.

Dr. Fidler also practiced psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand and created the department of psychiatry for the Oman Medical College in the Sultanate of Oman.

Dr. Fidler served on the Program Committee and chaired the Video Committee for the American Psychiatric Association. He served as President of the Association for Academic Psychiatry, promoting the use of arts in psychiatry and was presented the AAP’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award.  In honor of his work in cultural psychiatry, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. He serves on the Arts and Humanities Committee for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, co-producing a video series on the History of Psychiatry.

During a thirty-year period, Dr. Fidler set up cultural psychiatry electives for medical students, psychiatry residents, and other health professional students to immerse in and study extremely rural settings and various world tribes. He lived and worked with the Alutiiq tribe in Akhiok, Alaska, the Al Moqbali Bedouin tribe near Sohar, Oman, the Kalkadoon Tribe in the outback of Queensland, Australia, and the Te Tau Ihu Maori Tribes on the South Island of New Zealand. Several tribes made him an honorary member.

Combining psychiatry and theatre arts, Dr. Fidler co-founded the Symptom Media Company in San Diego that produced over five-hundred films with Los Angeles and New York actors portraying mental health professionals, people with mental health issues, human development, and first responder situations that are used in teaching by two-hundred universities and health science programs.

DC Fidler began his acting career in outdoor dramas, summer stock theatre, and local films and television at age ten. He wrote scripts and composed music for over fifty medical educational videos and his plays have been produced in community theatres, at universities, and in professional theatres in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, St. Louis, Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

He consulted and appeared in educational productions for HBO, ABC, and PBS and performed in stage plays including: Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Night of January 16th, Thieves’ Carnival, Blood Wedding, Our Town, A Life in the Theatre, and Fool for Love. DC Fidler is an active member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Charlotte Writers’ Club.

He authored the textbook, Psychiatry for Actors: Building a Character Using Psychiatric Principles, and authored two novels: Boogieban and Wood Whisperers.

DC Fidler is grateful for the fortune of having numerous people in life nurture his passions for writing and theatre and nurture his passions for psychiatry and cultures.