Alexander Sasha Bardey, AB 1983

One of my hardest challenges happened right off the bat of my healthcare career, in medical school. The first two years were preclinical, meaning you never left the classroom. Coming out of Harvard, where the emphasis was on thinking and being creative rather than rote memorization, I found medical school very challenging. But I’m glad I stayed. Soon, I realized I was really more of a macrobiologist than a microbiologist. On my psychiatric rotation, I’ll never forget my first patient was a man in his fifties with schizophrenia and looked straight out of a fishing show - plaid shirt, cap, and all. His chief symptom was that he saw Snap, Crackle, and Pop come out at night and cut off his arms and legs. I really got to know him and work with him, and the field of psychiatry opened up to me. I’m learning about their background, their life, who they are, what they’ve done, their biopsychosocial history - it was fascinating to me. I decided I was going to go into psychiatry.

As a forensic psychiatrist, I spend a lot of time testifying. The challenge in testifying is turning the thinking and vocabulary of medical science into something that the jury can relate to and understand. That doesn’t just mean learning new vocabulary, but also learning a whole new way of thinking. In medicine, when you’re trying to solve a problem, it’s about expanding possibilities and the differential diagnosis of considering every possibility.

The thinking in law is that everything is guilty or not guilty, insane or not insane, is he competent to stand trial or not. It required altering my way of medical thinking that I’ve been taught for all those years.

If having bipolar or panic disorder is no different than having hypertension or diabetes, then the way of approaching treatment would be so much more consistent. Through my forensic work, I deal with a lot of non compliant people, and I always try and get them to understand that chronic mental illness is not curable. Just like hypertension is not curable, and diabetes is not curable. But it’s manageable - if you’re taking the right psychotropics, your mental state will be normal. It’s been very slow, unfortunately, for stigmas around mental illness to go away. In other diseases, celebrities and athletes have come forward, but not so much with mental illness. But we’ve made progress since when I first started. I was working on Rikers Island back in 2000 and 2001, and I would say at least 45% of the inmates had diagnosable mental illness. Since then, we’ve made huge strides in moving people out of the criminal justice system and back into mental health.

I am, and for a number of years, the technical consultant for Law and Order SVU and appeared in court TV episodes as a talking head, analyzing serial killers and other notorious crimes committed by people with mental illnesses. I also co-produced a movie, Side Effects, about seven or eight years ago. It’s been really fun talking to actors and advising people on how to make something psychiatrically sound or helping them understand it. And, to talk about just another reason why I love what I do -

I’ve done thousands of evaluations in my career, and each time I meet someone, it’s a completely new experience and it never gets old. I’m never bored, and with the investigative aspect, understanding what someone’s mental state was when they committed a crime is such a profound and exciting investigation. When you get the answer, it’s just so thrilling and rewarding.

Alexander Sasha Bardey MD

AB 1983 | Biology

Forensic Psychiatrist at Fifth Avenue Forensics

Interviewed and Compiled by Felicia Ho