Meet an APA Awardee: Charles Dike, M.D., M.P.H.

Charles C. Dike, M.D., M.P.H., professor of psychiatry in the division of law and psychiatry at Yale University, will deliver the 2025 Chester M. Pierce Human Rights Award Lecture today. Dike said he hopes to focus his presentation on the notion of race and violence and how it’s shaped by social and cultural forces. “I want to explore this notion from my travels around the world,” he said, “and address the role of history in the narratives that have grown up around race and violence.”

Dike is also chief medical officer for the Connecticut State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services; immediate past president of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL), which has established the Charles Dike Scholarship to award two annual scholarships to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field of forensic psychiatry; past chair of the APA Committee on Ethics; and author of the monthly “Ethics Corner” column in Psychiatric News.

“Charles Dike has an extraordinary track record of achievement as a clinician, public servant, ethicist, and human rights advocate, including his work as chair of the APA Committee on Ethics,” said APA CEO and Medical Director Marketa M. Wills, M.D., M.B.A. “His international perspective and commitment to justice, fairness, and equity within psychiatry but also in the broader society model the example set by my beloved former professor Chester Pierce. I am personally very proud to have Charles deliver the lecture that honors Dr. Pierce, and I want to urge members to attend what I know will be a lively and inspiring address.”

In an interview with Psychiatric News, Dike noted that his mentor at Yale—Ezra Griffith, M.D., who delivered the 2023 Chester Pierce Award Lecture (and who is also a Psychiatric News columnist)—is the author of “Race and Excellence: My Dialogue With Chester Pierce.” Dike said the text was formative for him in highlighting the thinking of Pierce, whom he called “a huge luminary not just in the field of psychiatry but in the understanding of race and race relations in the United States.”

He added, “I am extremely humbled to be mentioned in the same breath as Chester Pierce.”

Dike said that his vision of racial justice has been shaped by his international perspective—born, raised, and educated in Nigeria and later emigrating first to England for his psychiatry residency and then to the United States. “I cannot avoid the influence of my upbringing,” he said. “I was raised in a predominantly Black country where all my teachers in grade school and high school were Black. They were associated with a competence and confidence that we took for granted growing up in Nigeria.

“But when I came to the U.S. in 1998, I immediately discovered that I was ‘a Black man’—and here that was associated with incompetence, untrustworthiness, violence, being a criminal, all kinds of things,” Dike said. “That really shocked me.”

The Chester M. Pierce Human Rights Award recognizes the extraordinary efforts of individuals to promote the human rights of populations with mental health needs by bringing attention to their work. Originally established in 1990 to raise awareness of human rights abuses, the award was renamed in 2017 to honor Chester M. Pierce, M.D. (1927-2016), recognizing his dedication as an innovative researcher on humans in extreme environments; an advocate against disparities, stigma, and discrimination; and a pioneer and visionary in global mental health. ■